Opera Settles $12.75m Lawsuit, But with Whom?

An anonymous reader writes "According to a press release from Opera Software ASA, they have settled legal claims with an international corporation resulting in payment to Opera of net USD 12.75 million. The interesting bit is that the international corporation is unknown. Dagbladet speculates that Microsoft is paying up. They reason it has something to do with this."

Comments

Great

[Karamchand]

..because even if they don't get enough paying customers they have more money again to continue developing the browser with the world's best user interface!

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious. It really does have a good user interface (7.50 got better - it's an acquired taste if you used 7.23, but it's easier for someone who didn't use Opera before), but paying customers do seem to be a bit rare (I tune out the Google ads, myself).

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean they're contributing to the Firefox components now? Wonder what new features they're going to introduce?

Re:Great

[barzok]

I've tried Opera on a few occasions. Tried being the operative word. I just could not get past the UI. It was crazy. Too many things going on, too many menu items, things placed in completely non-obvious locations. I wanted to like Opera, I even switched to it for a couple months while I waited for Mozilla to stabilize in the pre-0.9 days, but the UI and some of the other features were deal breakers for me.

Asa summed up a lot of the feelings I had in a couple of his blog posts. Granted, he's likely to be somewhat Gecko-biased, but he raises very valid points.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, and I am using it right now, but it still doesn't handle javascript worth crap....

Re:Great

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, on most of today's faster machines, I prefer Mozilla 1.6 (and newer) because it properly renders web pages correctly in the vast majority of cases. I've had some trouble with Opera being unable to render some web pages correctly, especially complicated ones like ESPN.com.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

ESPN.com redirects to: http://msn.espn.go.com/

Gee, MSN again. Wonder what's up there?

Re:Great

[Sheepdot]

..as opposed to the browser (internet explorer) with no paying customers but a streamlined interface.

So streamlined and easy to use that it installs all sorts of fun tools without any of those silly, annoying, installation confirmation steps.

Re:Great

[pracz]

Even if i prefer Mozilla Firefox/Mozilla too, i would warn you that the site you refer to is not valid HTML! I think that rendering engines should be compared only on valid code...

cheers ;)

Re:Great

[Liselle]

An interesting read, but not exactly an objective review. He's whinging about something trivial that's part of getting accustomed to a new browser. The browser takes getting used to, and it not for everyone, but it's very customizable.

On the blog post you linked to, there's a comment about 1/3 of the way down by someone named "sas", doing a possible "review" of Firefox in the same manner that Opera was treated. I thought it was pretty on-target (and funny), especially the parts about the extentions. ;)

Re:Great

[Crizp]

Opera had one thing I liked: the mouse movement based back/left and other actions... press the left key, move the mouse up and then to the left and the browser hits 'back'. It's great, at least when you're mousing around the page anyways. We all know keyboard shortcuts are best, right?

Re:Great

[HD Webdev]

..because even if they don't get enough paying customers they have more money again to continue developing the browser with the world's best user interface!

They won't continue getting paying customers by doing stupid stuff like charging extra for people with dual-boot systems.

That happened to me. I purchased Opera because it saved me a lot of time at work (groupmarks, tabbed browsing). Then, when I couldn't get the serial code I purchased working on the Linux partition, they informed me that I'd have to pay extra to get a Linux serial number.

In light of that experience, and especially now that Mozilla has both of those features, I don't recommend Opera to anyone.

If the Opera people can't be extra nice to the (maybe) 1% of people who actually buy it instead of leaving it with ads or entering a serial number found on the internet, they don't have their priorities straight..

Re:Great

[phats garage]

I'm happy also.

Its very important to me that I have a safe browser to use when I run windows. Why Microsoft can't drill down and work on the safety of their OS and hire wizards like the Opera developers for the browser is beyond me.

The disadvantages of throwing everything into the OS is clear, complexity of tightly coupled systems removes from modular development recommendations that are central to safe programming practices. Why Microsoft is afraid of competition at the browser level is mystifying at the very least.

Re:Great

[MtViewGuy]

I would kind of agree with you, but you do have to remember that ESPN's web page is one of THE most popular sites on the Internet in the USA. As such, if you can't read that web page correctly that can cause problems for many users.

The fact I can properly read ESPN.com with Mozilla 1.6 shows that the developers of Mozilla are willing to accommodate the wishes of the majority of Internet users.

Re:Great

[pracz]

I think you should try Mozilla Firefox with the Mouse Gestures plugin. You'll be surprised!

Re:Great

[acidvoid]

Yep, it is great.
good software deserves to be rewarded, I have a Windows licence and a Linux licence. Will probably soon add a Mac licence also.
It's quick, has lots of good features, and the interface (in 7.5) has finaly been cleaned up.
The email (which I don't use anymore) was a little strange in the past, but clever: you have a database of emails with a bunch of views on this database -> instead of a bunch of folders with emails in them.

GO OPERA!

Re:Great

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

What, you mean like Mozilla mouse gestures (which supports 44, at last count, of Mozilla's navigation, navigation, zoom and control functions)?

Re:Great

[Tiram]

If you find the Opera UI cluttered, simply remove those elements you don't need. My Opera UI has four buttons and a status field, and shows the time and my browser ID -- that's it. Practically anything can be removed simply by right-clicking and choosing "Remove from toolbar", or by choosing "Customize toolbars". Even my mother can do it. If you still think it's cluttered, hit "F11" and surf with keyboard shortcuts in full-screen mode. Let's see anything Gecko-based do that!

Re:Great

[Jugalator]

I don't use the mail or IRC client so I disabled them in the Preferences. I use Opera 7.50.

Too many things going on

It has just one more menu than Firefox (the standard Windows menu), the average menu size is maybe 3-4 items larger than Firefox's, and I have only 5 buttons in the toolbar (back, forward, refresh/stop [in same button], home, wand). 1 search field, 1 address field.

Can't say anything is in non-obvious places either. I mean, how hard can it be to find the proper menu option when you only have 3 non-standard menus at an average length of maybe 12 items? (I consider File, Edit, Window, Bookmark, Help to all be very standardized or straight forward with the regular options).

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I always thought Opera's initial popularity was garnered from it being a tiny, "lean and mean" browser, whereas now it's just a big bloated hodgepodge full of unnecessary "stuff" (and who really uses those features anyhow?) Ironic that the once "tiny browser" is now crammed with more crap than IE or Netscape.

I've run several versions of Opera since day one, and while I commend the programmer and cheer on the "little guys" in the browser market, I just could not fathom paying for it (or should I say the bloat that comes with it), particularly now with the likes of Mozilla Firefox and such.

I think Opera should step back from the bloat, release an updated minimalist version (as it once was back in the day), and sell it online for $5. Will that happen? Probably not. Will alot of people pay for Opera in it's current state? Probably not.

Re:Great

[Crizp]

Man, I remember skimming a line about some mouse gesture something for firefox somewhere sometime not long ago, and was actually looking for it now, loaded texturizer.net but forgot it in another desktop :)

Thanks, and to the second reply too.

Re:Great

[barzok]

Opera is the first browser I've used where the default toolbar/menu configuration was cumbersome. That's a sign. I shouldn't have to customize the hell out of it upon install just to make it usable.

If you still think it's cluttered, hit "F11" and surf with keyboard shortcuts in full-screen mode. Let's see anything Gecko-based do that!

Firefox seems to be doing it just fine right now. Mozilla seems to be doing it too.

Re:Great

[Jugalator]

"lean and mean" browser

Firefox is called the "lean, mean browsing machine". Opera has just called it "the fastest browser on earth", and they still rank very well there, although I haven't compared with a stop watch...

After disabling the Mail & IRC to transform it from something like the Mozilla suite to Firefox, I actually enjoy and regularly use most of its features and can't complain about bloat. It's still just a 3 MB download too, if you don't include the entire Java package. :-) This is much smaller than Firefox, and it also lacks all the XUL junk I don't care for really.

Re:Great

[bigtrouble77]

I use Opera at home and installed firefox on all 50+ of the work machines I administer (because it's free).

I find opera, by far, to be the superior browser for these reasons:

1. It's faster
2. It has a much better UI out-of-the-box
(I mean features, not visuals)
3. It has a hugely useful hotlist menu
(file transfers, personal notes, dictionary,
and finally links to newest slashdot articles)
4. Tabbed browsing is 10x better
5. User Profiles are organized better
6. Ultra customizable

I don't find the UI confusing at all. Albeit, I do adjust it to look nothing like the default settings. Version 7.5 is very stable, unlike some of the earlier builds and site compatibility is as good as firefox.

Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser.

Re:Great

[pracz]

I understand your point of view but by doing thas way, we'll run into troubles because the internet will become more and more a disgusting soup of ugly code and flash animations.

We are far away from the concept of Semantic Web!

Re:Great

[jkabbe]

Firefox is called the "lean, mean browsing machine".

It should be called the "lean, mean crashing machine" because that's what it does 3-4 times a day for me.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

With keyboard shortcuts?

Re:Great

[bahamat]

I'ts the animated giggly ads that piss me off, not the extra buttons on the toolbar. I don't need a 480x60 block chopped out of my toolbar and getting in my way just so Opera can make $.01 per view, especially when the Mozillas are free.

I use Firefox because it has awesome ad blocking capabilities. And if its built in ad blocking isn't enough for you there's the AdBlock extension which gives the user maximum control over ads. I can't remember the last time I saw one (yes, I steal web pages).

Opera can't have this feature because it is by its very nature "ad supported" software. Ads are visual clutter and noise. They have to be to draw your attention, that's what they're for. I want them out of my way because I'm trying to get work done dammit. Opera loses on this point alone because there's nothing you can say that will justify me having to look at that crap or shelling out thirty bucks to hide it.

Game, set, match. It's been nice debating with you.

Re:Great

[BrokenHalo]

I know this thread is designed to bring out the Opera zealots, but the "with this" in the original post seems a bit FUDish to me.

I just made the experiment of following those links to msn.com, and although I agree that different code is sent from msn.com according to the browser user-agent flag, I see no actual difference in the content (leaving out the banner ads, which are blocked in my hosts file).

All the experiment tells me is that there is more open space on the page rendered for Opera - which probably makes the page less messy and cluttered.

That aside, the content at msn.com isn't worth reading anyway.

Re:Great

[Vargasan]

"...After disabling the Mail & IRC to transform it from something like the Mozilla suite to Firefox..."

Except that you don't really disable it. Opera just HIDES them. You still have access to them, all the menu and panel items are gone. That's it.

It's a cheap way to do it, Opera, and I am ashamed.

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

I always thought Opera's initial popularity was garnered from it being a tiny, "lean and mean" browser, whereas now it's just a big bloated hodgepodge full of unnecessary "stuff" (and who really uses those features anyhow?) Ironic that the once "tiny browser" is now crammed with more crap than IE or Netscape.

It's still the tiny browser.

To get Opera 7.50 Final w/o Java Win32, it is a 3.4MB download. You get the following:
Browser (tabbed)
E-mail client with database
IRC client
RSS feed reading (via e-mail client)
Pop-up blocking
Mouse gestures

To get Mozilla 1.6 Final Win32, it is an 11.8MB download, for the following:
Browser (semi-tabbed)
Traditional e-mail client
IRC client
Web page editor
Pop-up blocking

To get Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 Win32, it can vary from an 11MB to a 75MB download (at it's SMALLEST, it's only ~800KB smaller than Moz), and is usually 25MB (according to MS). You get this:
Browser
Traditional e-mail client
What, you thought you'd get MSN Messenger in the deal? Sorry, that's another download.

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

I'll admit that Opera's gained some bloat over the years, but it's still damn small. Something tells me they realized "Fastest Browser on Earth" was a Bad Idea(TM), as Links and Lynx are probably faster, and Contiki would blow Opera away on speed, considering Opera needs more hard drive than the C64 has RAM...

Re:Great

[eric76]

I paid up when they offered two licenses (Linux and Windoze) for the price of one.

There is one thing that I don't like about Opera. At one time on the windoze version, you could change the directories of where the information is stored. Then they took away that capability.

On a windoze computer, I really like to keep the operating system and programs on a separate drive from the data. That way, I can rebuild the system drive at will without losing any data.

The directory selections you can make with Opera change from release to release. On 7.50, about all you can do is set what directory it uses for downloads.

Re:Great

[BrokenHalo]

Mouse gestures are probably very fine if you happen to like them. I made a serious effort with Mozilla's mouse gestures for about 3 months, but one day when I forgot to install them in a package I had built, I had a good think about what I actually used them for, and realised that (for me) they were a waste of space.

I know other people have different ways of using their browsers, but I tend to middle-click links to open them in tabs in the background, then open those tabs when I'm ready and close them with ctrl-W.

This simple process takes a lot of work out of learning how to use an interface.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, what's your point? Tried a recent Mozilla? It's the Emacs of browsers, any feature Opera or any other browser has ever had it now has, plus some of its own.

Re:Great

[ccp]

I don't find the UI confusing at all. Albeit, I do adjust it to look nothing like the default settings.

Same thing here. The best part of Opera is its amazing configurability.

With a little work, you can tune the beast to your exact style, and from then on, you browse in heaven. The other browsers, no matter how good, just feel clunky.

Cheers,

Re:Great

[BrokenHalo]

It should be called the "lean, mean crashing machine" because that's what it does 3-4 times a day for me.

Maybe you should give Mozilla another try then. It takes a lot to crash that. You don't have to put up with all the bloat; I compile mine without the mail client or any of the other bells and whistles that I never use and it does everything I want the way I like it.

I mainly stay away from Firefox because of minor differences in behaviour where I happen to prefer Mozilla, and with the latter stripped down it's just as quick as firefox.

Re:Great

[jkabbe]

Thanks for the suggestion. But, I don't compile. I just click the icon :)

Thankfully for my browsing at home I get a much better selection including Safari and Camino (which, to my eyes, far outshines Firefox).

Re:Great

[sowellfan]

I currently use Mozilla at home & IE at work.

What would really help me out would be an option to invert the colors on the screen when some web designer makes one of those black background w/ white or yellow text sites (Yes, I know I can select the text, but that's a pain). What about just making things easy to read, you website designers? The opera site, Arstechnica, and probably three-quarters of gaming sites out there are built in this color scheme, and it sucks.

Now, on my nice home monitor, I can read without too much trouble. But my employer buys monitors from Sams for our CAD work, so the white letters on black just tend to get swallowed up. So think about us people with sucky monitors when you're putting together information on the web. Pretty is great, but not at the expense of being difficult to read.

Re:Great

[sircrown]

You can still modify the INI file and change all the various paths. It's just that now (assuming you chose to allow multiple profiles) the INI file is stored in Documents & Settings instead of under Program Files. Make sure hidden files are visible and search for opera6.ini and edit away.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Even IE seems to be working just fine doing that. I guess it must be the most advanced browser.

Re:Great

[cybermancer]

Optimoz's mouse gestures are not as fluid as Opera's.

Re:Great

[mfg]

Try some of these bookmarklets - the Zap ones can make most things readable

Re:Great

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Frustrated by endless MSIE crashes on a Win95 machine with cramped RAM and HDD, I finally gave up in disgust a year ago and installed Opera.

It was like night and day ... even though it still crashes about 10% as often as MSIE did. Opera struck me as so well constructed, and so responsive to user methods, that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company that made such a gem. As you said, tabs can make browsing much better.

Of course, Opera's example is what we should have always had. It's only MSIE's dominance that led us to accept particularly bad software.

Re:Great

[avgjoe62]

I would kind of agree with you, but you do have to remember that ESPN's web page is one of THE most popular sites on the Internet in the USA. As such, if you can't read that web page correctly that can cause problems for many users.

The fact I can properly read ESPN.com with Mozilla 1.6 shows that the developers of Mozilla are willing to accommodate the wishes of the majority of Internet users.

Read the article at the last link in the story. MSN (which is where ESPN comes from) checks the agent sent by the browser and then sends Opera a style sheet purposely designed to display incorrectly. Reminds of when I was in the Pentagon in 1997 and Netscape would display empty pages at Microsoft.com where IE showed content.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Opera only HIDES mail and chat until you restart the browser, then Opera SKIPS initializing anything related to the M2 (mail/chat) module for faster startup.

The mailer is only restarted if you turn it on from Preferences again.

Re:Great

[BlitzPig_Sal]

Opera has a great feature that helps with those sites, it's the user mode style sheet button. With one click you can apply your own, easy-to-read style sheet to any site. Simple click of the toolbar button and it's back to what the author intended. Works beautifully.

Re:Great

[NanoGator]

"Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser. "

Agreed. It's a pity they don't show the cartoons in the advertising bar anymore. I actually switched back to the ad supported version hoping to encourage them to keep plopping them in there. Wouldn't it be cool if they took comics like Dilbert or Get Fuzzy and had them appear regularly there? Certainly made me more attentive to the ads. Small price to pay for some entertainment.

Re:Great

[cayenne8]

"...The fact I can properly read ESPN.com with Mozilla 1.6 shows that the developers of Mozilla are willing to accommodate the wishes of the majority of Internet users."

Well, not quite that exactly. The wishes of the majority of Internet users....the ones that DO know the Internet != IE....just want a page that renders correctly on their browser. Standards for publishing HTML...etc. allow for them to do so. If IE hadn't 'hijacked' the browser world a few years ago, helped by their monopoly....there would be fewer 'kludges' that you have to do to day just to try to accomodate the IE bugs.

The standards if followed and enforced would ensure a great presentation for one and all....the fact that the Mozilla team had to take non-standard kludges into mind and code is actually kind of sad...

Re:Great

[Dever]

you have to customize the hell out of firefox et al just to make it featureful for all intents and purposes. i'm in favor of smaller, lighter browsers but having to download 15 extensions with no way to even aggregate them (that i'm informed of) kind of sucks.

Re:Great

[GSloop]

I don't know exactly how much you looked at the examples in the article.

It was cutting off the left-most parts of the paragraphs in the white frame.

Thus you couldn't really read the articles as it was like reading a printed page with the left few words cut off. Every line required guessing which words were missing.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:Great

[mikis]

just made the experiment of following those links to msn.com, and although I agree that different code is sent from msn.com according to the browser user-agent flag, I see no actual difference in the content (leaving out the banner ads, which are blocked in my hosts file).

If you actually opened the link, you would clearly see that it was posted in 2003, and from the screenshots you can see they were taken on February 5th and 6th. So it is entirely possible that they (MS) fixed it in this 15 months. It's not like that they'd settle this things in few days.

Re:Great

[barzok]

I don't have any extensions installed that an "average" user would be lost without - aside from TabBrowser Preferences, they're all development-related. My father uses Mozilla, with no extensions, and is fine (and he's an average user). He'd be fine with FireFox too, he just uses Moz because he likes his mail & web in one suite. My brother also runs Mozilla with no extensions, and has never wanted for anything.

What critical features are missing? I haven't found any yet.

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

WHOA... That was in February 2003, and Opera got MSN to fix it.

Re:Great

[mikis]

Just go to your Opera directory and delete or rename m2.dlz file, that's all. But it is only 230 KB large! (ok, probably twice that when unpacked).

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You've clearly never developed for the browser though. For users, yes opera is a decent interface. For programmers its a horridly slow peice of crap. 6 is completely unusible from a development point of view and 7 is only marginally better. For DOM->JS compliance its sub par and far slower. The object models are too static and enumation is a total pain.

I do a lot of javascript development and we just simply wont support opera anymore. We'll write to standards and output nothing non-standard and when opera gets its dom compliance in order then maybe it can get out of the beta stages.

At the same time tho, any kind of plugin or extended stuff is highly buggy and theres often security issues related to the way a lot of operas core security works. A simple flash->js->flash communication using fscommands still causes the whole browser to crash off.

For every reason to use it for its ui theres 1000 reasons not to from a programmers perspective. Making a browser is more about content processing than UI.

Long live msie even if it is from microsoft.

Re:Great

[bunratty]

Mozilla has such a small share of the overall browser market (definately under 10% worldwide) that it's not going to have much of an effect on what junk webmasters are going to put on their servers. It's really what Internet Explorer (with around 90% share) accepts that has a large effect on what web developers write.

Re:Great

[wheany]

I tend to middle-click links to open them in tabs in the background, then open those tabs when I'm ready and close them with ctrl-W.

You can do exactly that in Opera.

Re:Great

[h4rm0ny]

Can't you just create a link to... oh, yes... sorry.

*ahem*

I love Linux.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Ads are visual clutter and noise. They have to be to draw your attention, that's what they're for. I want them out of my way because I'm trying to get work done dammit.

Well, if you're really trying to get work done using Opera then surely you, or your employer, can afford to pay the registration fee to get rid of the ads.

Good software (such as Opera) is always worth paying for.

Re:Great

[Ryosen]

>> that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company

Do or do not. There is no "thinking of buying."

Seriously, folks. If you like Opera, just buy the damn thing. The price is extremely reasonable ($39 buy, $15 upgrade) for an app that you probably use constantly. I know that, on my machine, the only software that gets used more than Opera is the operating system itself!

And please don't use the excuse "well, they just got a 12.5 million dollar settlement" as a reason to not send in your pocket change. We all know that their lawyers will get the lion's share of it anyway.

Just my 2 cents. The rest of it went here.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It's faster

You neglected to mention what OS you're talking about, but since you mentioned installing Firefox on the machines you administer, I'm going to assume you're talking about Windows. What about Linux? Are there any objective tests on this subject out there?

3. It has a hugely useful hotlist menu
(file transfers, personal notes, dictionary,
and finally links to newest slashdot articles)

Personally, I want my browser to be just a browser, which is partly why I switched from the Mozilla suite to Firefox back when it was called Phoenix. I'd rather have features like those you mentioned avaliable as extensions or something so as to avoid the feature creep that plagues so many software projects.

4. Tabbed browsing is 10x better

In what sense? Have you tried installing the Tabbrowser Extensions for Firefox? (If you want to complain about having to install a separate extension, see my previous point.)

6. Ultra customizable

Firefox is pretty darn customizable, too, with all the extensions available and the about:config page (though I freely admit that about:config isn't the most user-friendly way to configure things).

Actually, the one thing I really liked about Opera back in the day was something you didn't mention: mouse gesture support. Firefox can do this via the Mouse Gestures extension, but they don't work right in Linux with the right mouse button because of some issue with X Windows or something. Even when I used Firefox (then Firebird) in Windows, the mouse gesture support wasn't as good as that in Opera: in particular, the system wasn't as responsive to mouse gestures as it was with Opera, and gestures didn't work in certain places, such as over UI components and certain web page elements, something I'm sure is due to the fact that mouse gestures are implemented as a plugin in Mozilla/Firefox as opposed to being built-in as they are in Opera.

The things I like more about Firefox, though, include the fact that it's open source (I am one of those people to whom that matters; if it doesn't matter to you, tough beans) and the plethora of available extensions, especially Adblock, which has done wonders for my browsing experience.

Mike

P.S. Has anyone else noticed that Slashdot automatically changes multiple consecutive blank lines in posts into a single blank line? That's kind of annoying if you ask me...

Re:Great

[jp10558]

There of course is no argument for Opera if you feel the software must be free.

That's why Linux and Mozilla are doing so well. At the other extreme is the Maciontosh system. Somewhere in the middle seems to be windows.

If you use windows, Opera might be great software, it comes down to whether you are willing to pay for something that does what it does better than the competition. Of course that is subjective also. I use Eudora, because I have bad experiances with Outlook(express). I use Opera becasue I had bad experiances with I.E. and Netscape(at the time 6 just came out). I use what works best for me. And that is what it comes down to.

It's obvious if you don't like the interface, don't use the software. If you do like the interface, you have to think about whether it is worth it to pay the $40 for the real deal, or to approximate it for free. Kind of like getting a pair of pants at Men's Warehouse, or buying them from Haband.

Re:Great

[KILNA]

Agreed, and the average user isn't going to install an extension to use it.

Re:Great

[KILNA]

Even Firefox, the "lite" Mozilla, is 6.2MB.

Re:Great

[LaCosaNostradamus]

My life has been a constant state of uncertainty since 1997, hence I'm used to putting things off. Nevertheless, you're right. It's only 40 bucks; heck, I gave the Slacksters 50 for a copy of Slackware. I'll cut Opera a check tonight.

Re:Great

[Mesaeus]

Well, to each his own. I use Opera for all my browsing these days, and the number of pages that are rendered wrong seems to keep diminishing. I tried an Opera 6.xx version on my ISP's webpages a year ago, it didn't render the tree-like menu that the site uses to navigate correctly, the submenus couldn't be expanded and it was basically useless. Somewhere along the road Opera fixed this (although I bet it was my ISP's web"master" who was to blame), and I can now use it exactly like in Explorer. I now rarely fire up Explorer, mostly for my Online Banking. Most banks seem to have trouble supporting IE, let alone some other browser.

Re:Great

[Sj0]

K-meleon ( kmeleon.sourceforge.net ) includes a tabbed web browser. and a popup blocker, if you want to consider a setting in a config file a "popup blocker". It uses native API calls.

It's quite fast. 5.2Mhz today, but that's with a lot of stuff you don't nessessarily need to install, such as the opera/netscape bookmark plugins, mouse gestures, and a couple other nice plugins.

Also, you won't find an easier to customize web browser out there. :)

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

> whinging

He's what? Do you mean whining?

Sincerely, the Society for the Proper Spelling of Euphamisms

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

whinge- intr.v. Chiefly British whinged, whinging, whinges

To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

5.2MHz? I didn't know they MADE web browsers WITH BUILT IN CPUs!

BTW, 5.2MB, and the bloat is bookmark plugins and MOUSE GESTURES (that stays if you're comparing against a browser with them)? BTW, where's the e-mail client?

Re:Great

[Mycroft_VIII]

Another case of two countries seperated by one language.

Mycroft

Re:Great

[obeythefist]

Actually one of the key reasons for me using Opera is the customisable nature of the software. Unfortunately there are moves to make Opera purely a tabbed browsing application.

I am quite happy using my operating system to navigate different windows, and I see no need for an application to pick up tasks that are better suited to my operating environment.

Re:Great

[obeythefist]

First thing I do after installing opera is turn all the superflous junk off. I like my real estate. That's when you see the true usability of Opera over most other browsers- you can customise it.

I suggest you try Opera again, this time remember who's in control.

Re:Great

[obeythefist]

There's your problem right there... Win95. What year is it now? 2004? Significantly later than 1995? Who uses a 9 year old operating system now anyway? (apologies to mainframe workers).

Re:Great

[obeythefist]

It's a marketing thing. Marketing is often ignored in the open source arena, but Opera has a business model and they need to stick to it.

Unfortunately this means they have to make the browser appear rich and featurefilled to try and sell more copy.

Nonetheless I am quite happy to customise the interface. Just about everything I install I am quite used to customising to some extent.

I am sure just about everyone on slashdot customises their OS interface, web browser, mail client, IM client... just about everything in fact, before they use it.

Why should you treat Opera any different?

Re:Great

[pantherace]

1. It isn't faster: konqueror (3.2+) & firefox (0.8) beat it easily (compared with 7.23). It's number 3.
2. The fast foreward & rewind are interesting, but it seems they have gone the firefox route with the: people are too stupid to understand more than 5 buttons. (7 in opera's case)
3. Good feature, but I don't use it.
4. Invented, and well done, but Konqueror seems to do it better.
5. That's a hack (and in my opinion a bad one) to get around a lack of user accounts.
6. Konqueror has it beat on that. And dear goodness: Firefox needs to learn that options are not an evil thing!

Things not mentioned:
Scales down better than any other browser. Look at the Zaurus to see.
Smaller download than most anything else. 3-4 MB (3.4MB without java for windows) vs 6+ for firefox (6.3MB compiled for windows)

Couple of good features from others:
Konqueror's Copy To, Open with and Actions menu (some of that is more useful as a file manager, which opera isn't)
Konqueror's & Firefox's font handling. Opera should look as good (same windowing system, same computer, same monitors) but doesn't, nor does it look good on Windows. Firefox does look good under Windows. IE doesn't do fonts well either.
Konqueror's rendering at high resolutions (1600x1200 for example). Looks better than any other browser at high resolution.
Konqueror's web shortcuts: type "gg: foo" in the location bar, and it will search google for "foo", it's configurable (define your own) and has a lot of things already. Opera & Firefox both have a seperate box for it, but I find that less efficient, and as far as I can find, Opera doesn't allow it to be configured for other sites.

Opera is a good browser (#2 after Konqueror, #3 is firefox) They tend to invent things, but others tend to end up implementing them better. (at least among the open-source browsers) Why would anyone use IE, that browser sucks compared to any other I have used lately (possible exception of links in graphical mode, but that's a text-based browser at heart!)

Hmmm.... the top two browsers use Qt, I wonder if that's coincidence?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, seeya, don't come back, thanks for playing, don't let the door hit your arse on the way out, and whatever you do don't ever, ever tell us about how much you like not paying for software or complaining when you don't get something for nothing.

Re:Great

[obeythefist]

Having said that, a full upgrade to MSIE6 SP1 is about 90MB. A full install of Opera 7.x including Suns Java (no more MS VM) is 14MB.

You were saying something about bloat?

Re:Great

[Sj0]

The e-mail client is something else. Integration is for suckers.

Previous releases have clocked pretty close to opera 7, but the latest version boasts far greater compatibility with sites due to it's superior rendering engine.

besides -- I got gLinks for Linux in 500k. What's keeping opera so big? :P

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

GLinks doesn't have the greatest rendering engine, BTW. Also, in my experience, /. logins require a forced refresh to work (Links apparently loads slashdot.org from the cache after a login).

Re:Great

[LaCosaNostradamus]

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

That particular machine is a Pentium I, 100MHz, 32MB RAM, 500MB HDD, and finally a 56K modem. It works just fine for browsing, email, spreadsheets, etc.

Of course, it's not even the low end 1337 g4/\/\1ng platform. Like I give a rat's ass.

If it works, don't upgrade it -- it will soon stop working if you do.

Thee Tenors?

[dominick]

I believe it's a settlement with the three tenors. Hardy har har!

Re:Thee Tenors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three tenners? That's 30!

Re:Thee Tenors?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's with the family of man who invented the word opera.

*Lame joke alert*

[foidulus]

Maybe it is the random that the phantom of the Opera demanded!
This has been a test of the lame joke broadcast system, this is only a test, in the event of a real lame joke, Cowboy Neal's name would have been mentioned, thank you for your time.

Re:*Lame joke alert*

[kryptkpr]

random? you mean ransom right? Preview.. then Preview again.

Re:*Lame joke alert*

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

I have a theory that /.'s comment code automagicilly puts errors in your posts - missng letters and teh good old reversals and so on - after you have previewed your comment and hit submit. After all, I always preview my comments yet there are always a few tyops that make me cringe...

Or maybe I just use IRC too much..

Re:*Lame joke alert*

[jeffshoaf]

After all, I always preview my comments yet there are always a few tyops that make me cringe... Quod nesciunt eos interficiet Yeah, there's so many typos in your sig that I can't even tell what it's 'sposed to mean!

Re:*Lame joke alert*

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

:)

The translation is "What they don't know will kill them" In this case I recommend checking that my sig hasn't attempted to boobytrap your keyboard...

Microsoft?

[Liselle]

I'm an Opera zealot if there ever was one. The issue with MSN was absolutely infuriating. For those who didn't RTFA: MSN.com sent a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen, because it could only have been done intentionally.

I am also suspicious of Microsoft, but I doubt it has anything to do with the MSN debacle. All they did was just send a poorly-rendered page. It's underhanded, but most websites don't comply with W3C spec anyway. I suppose it's possible that Microsoft paid Opera to make it go away, but there's little proof.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Always a conspiracy - I wonder if anyone mailed MS to say the style sheet used has a bug in it, instead of 'opera isnt working with MSN'.

Assuming it isn't a conspiracy against Opera by MS, then its likely the former would have found its way to a tech who'd fix it, for the latter, you'd get the canned response about testing and not responsible for 3rd party products etc.

Re:Microsoft?

[L3on]

I believe there is a way to make opera be recognized as IE. I stopped using opera about 6 months ago when I found mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox. Anyhow, I'm assuming this would solve that problem.

Re:Microsoft?

[ptaff]

a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page

I guess they wanted to know how it feels to be forced into writing a different stylesheet like we all have to do to bypass the numerous layout bugs in MSIE. They didn't even do it right. Try with a clean W3-compliant source to begin with, next time, boys!

Re:Microsoft?

[makomk]

I've read the analysis. I doubt that Microsoft had a good reason to shift all the content 30 pixels to the left for Opera. The only reasons I can think of are:

• There was a bug in early versions of Opera which this worked around. Officialy, there wasn't; do you believe them? I do.
• They wanted to make their website look broken in Opera

Re:Microsoft?

[N3WBI3]

Well I cant say I sent one (I use mozilla) but the really odd part is if you fed the style sheet from IE to opera (or changed operara to answer IE) the page worked perfectly!

Is this proof? no.

Re:Microsoft?

[Liselle]

I believe there is a way to make opera be recognized as IE.

Yeah, there is. It's under File->Quick Preferences, Identify as blah. Has Opera, IE, and three flavors of Mozilla. Even two shortcuts: Ctrl-alt-I for IE and Ctrl-alt-O for Opera. Easier than falling out of bed, and less painful.

Re:Microsoft?

[dave420]

It could have been an honest mistake, as anyone who works with CSS and various browsers on a daily basis would tell you. It's certainly not uncommon for different CSS files to be sent to different browsers, and it's not uncommon for certain style sheets to break their intended browsers.

I understand why people jump at microsoft every chance they get, but to pull accusations out of thin air is pretty mad :)

Re:Microsoft?

[Liselle]

It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.

In this case, I'm calling malice. :P

Re:Microsoft?

[Ilgaz]

If you read the article, Opera itself PROVED its indeed targeting Opera only via using open source wget.

Ever wonder how MS got that big? Start to wonder...

Re:Microsoft?

[LO0G]

Last I had heard, MSN was serving a different style sheet to attempt to work around bugs in Opera 6 (at least that was the conclusion the last time that this came up on /.).

People tried looking at the offending pages with Opera6 and they looked fine, but with Opera 7 they looked like crap.

The guess was that the Opera guys fixed the bugs in Opera 7, and all of a sudden the "bug fixes" became obvious.

It wasn't malicious, it was an honest attempt to make MSN look less than crappy with Opera 6.

The only thing the MSN guys did wrong was not testing with Opera 7 before it was released.

Re:Microsoft?

[SvendTofte]

Opera's reasoning for believing that MS deliberatly sent a *mangled* stylesheet to the *new* (v. 7 at the time) Opera browser is quite simply stunning.

Of course, since Håkon isn't exactly MS pro, it comes as no great surprise either.

Reading Howcome's page, there is one perfectly believeble view on the whole affair, that Howcome deliberatly leaves out, in order to make MSN look bad. How very fitting for him.

The simple point that Howcome forgets to leave out, is that, while Opera 7 (note the seven), does get "stupid" content (let's say it was designed for retarded browsers), the key point is, that Opera 6 gets the FULL content (I tested this, when this story first came out)! Thus, it's clear, that it's merely a really badly coded browser sniffer on MSN's part. Nothing to do with "evil intentions". Just shitty code, that forgets about future versions of browsers.

I wrote howcome on the issue. His reply? I'm paraphrasing, but basicly, "it was not important"...

(Note that I am an Opera user too, but this extreme fanboyism I see from some Opera users is scary. Crying murder, because you get served a special page is just weird. Especially When there's no such thing)

Re:Microsoft?

[somethinghollow]

I've been debating this issue in my head for a long time. I even had a discussion with some tech journalist somewhere about it. But, basically, I don't see anything wrong with Microsoft blocking out whatever browser it choses. Here is my reasoning (at risk of someone telling me how my reasoning sucks by totally misconstruing it):

Lets pretend I run a club. While my club might be a really great, there are other clubs in the city, and they are really great, also.

I'm a bit of an elitest, so I only want people to come in that dress a certain way. So, I get my bouncers to stand outside and only let in the really attractive women in really nice cloths and guys that I think they might want hanging around them.

Well, it turns out that may be a good portion of the people that show up at my club, but I am still turning people away. These people go to other clubs since they can't get in mine.

Now, lets pretend that the pretty people don't spend as much money once they get past the door (some don't even get past the lobby), and the not-pretty people spend a good deal of money. My profits decline rapidly. I end up losing money in the end, but since I'm rich, I keep the place open. Other clubs are racking up dough.

Since I got tired of running my analogy about 1/2 way through, the quality of the analogy declined, but I'm sure everyone gets the point. If I am Bill Gates, and clubs are Internet Portals, and my club is MSN.com, and other clubs are other Internet Portals, and the bouncers are User Agent Detecting Scripts the point comes to light.

It's bad business to lock out people; but it is their business, and, assuming they aren't breaking any anti-discriminatory laws, they should be able to run it however they want. Sure you have a right to get pissed at them. But you also have a right to go somewhere else and tell everyone how shitty my bouncers are and how this other club does as good of a job anyway and has a better DJ. Make flyers and print stickers. Really stick it to me. You might even be able to convince some of the pretty people to start coming to the other club. You may even want to open your own club.

I'll admit that I'm ignoring that they have a monopoly and give out their browser home page set to MSN.com. If that is your complaint, don't bother replying. Otherwise, this is how I see it: A poor business decision.

Re:Microsoft?

[RedSteve]

Read the article (or at least the google cached article), and you will see that Opera's research showed that MSN was feeding opera a debilitated style sheet that had list items falling off the left edge of the screen. The code in question is

ul {
margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;
}

The research further showed that if you fed this same sheet to MSIE, it behaved exactly the same way -- that is, it fell off the left side of the page. Further, anyone who has ever done anything with style sheets would never feed that -30px declaration and expect anything productive to be done with it. That MSN fed it to someone else's browser but not theirs is suspicious at least.

Re:Microsoft?

[StormyMonday]

Uhh, dude? The pros test their code before it goes live.

Probability of this being an accident is zilch.

Re:Microsoft?

[mks113]

$quote =~ s/For those who didn't RTFA/For those who couldn't RTFA/

Thanks slashdot.

Re:Microsoft?

[curator_thew]

Nice attempt at reasoning, but _arbitrary_ restrictions relating to sale/use of your product are viewed as discriminatory. I say _arbitrary_ because you can discriminate on objective reasons, even if they are "my nightclub is about stylish people, so we only let in those well dressed and with good attitude".

Secondly, it's more severe when the discrimination relates to a competitive product, and even more so when you are a dominant company. When you're building a large content service on the one hand, and owning a viewing technology on the other hand, and in both cases you have a dominant market share: then arbitrary restraints on competitors are pretty serious issues that regulators will tackle.

I note also that recent Microsoft has been doing a _lot_ of out of court settlements, it seems as though they want to pay off problems. Equally, the large anti-trust rulings mean that Microsoft is skating on thin-ice and has the scrutiny of the regulators who would use such activities as future evidence in antitrust actions.

Better to reach a settlement which involves a confidentiality clause in which the supposed activities won't in the future be disclosed or used in any regulatory action.

Wise commercial move Microsoft!

Re:Microsoft?

[levik]

Actually after reading the article again, I realized that there was no ill intention against Opera per se on MSN's part.

If you look at the names of their css files, it becomes clear that they categorize browsers as IE for windows (presumably there is also a mac version), Netscape 6/7/Mozilla, and everything else.

The "everything else" stylesheet was arguably broken, but it was by no means targeted at Opera alone. In the article, the Opera people "prove" that it is by changing their UA string from containging Opera to Oprah. However, this proves nothing.

Assuming you are implementing a browser detection script based on the UA string, the way you used to find a Netscape browser is by looking for strings that contain "Mozilla" but do not contain "MSIE". This is because Internet Explorer has "Mozilla" in it's UA string.

The same is true of detecting explorer today. Most browsers today have "MSIE" somwhere in their UA string. Opera has not 1 but 2 instances of "MSIE" - it pretends to be explorer 5.5 and 6 simultaneously! Assuming Microsoft said we want to send the IE6 stylesheet only to Explorer, but not browsers PRETENDING to be explorer, they would have had to look for "MSIE" and specifically exclude other browsers known to pretend to be IE6. Opera is one of them, but there may be more.

Their proof is meaningless specifically because there is no "Oprah" browser - this means that any detection mechanism that they encountered treated "Oprah" UA as IE6. I cannot think of any other MSIE-pretenders off the top of my head, but if there are known ones out there, I am sure MSN would have sent these browsers the "generic" stylesheet as well.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit.

Please read the wikipedia article:

In February 2003, Opera Software employees discovered that the MSN home page sent a different style sheet to Opera users than it sent to Internet Explorer. The style sheet sent to Opera users, a generic 'site.css', contained the style rule ul {margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;}, which created a 30-pixel negative left margin, causing content to appear overlapping other content. The Internet Explorer style sheet did not contain this rule.

This gave the impression something was wrong with Opera. The Netscape 6 style sheet also specified the same -30px margin, to work around known bugs in that browser (bugs not present in Opera). This same code was present into the supposedly generic style sheet, which was served to Opera by a Javascript checking routine which specifically detected Opera. This was either a deliberate decision by a programmer to make Opera look bad, or was simply the action of someone who was aware of Opera's existence, but unaware of its CSS capabilities (which are in fact better than those of Internet Explorer), and hence chose to send the browser a generic (albeit badly coded) style sheet.

Regardless of the truth behind the story (which only the Microsoft programmer who wrote the code could know), Opera went public with the story, and created a joke "Bork" edition of their browser, which "translated" the page into the speech of the Swedish Chef to show how easily a website's appearance could be distorted.

Why would Microsoft deliberately do this to Opera, which poses no threat to them, and in fact builds its products on Microsoft's platform (i.e. you buy Opera for Windows, you need to pay Microsoft first). It's just a lie. Are you really stupid enough to imagine that Bill Gates called up the web developer and said 'Hi dude, can you fuck with the CSS for Opera'? I don't think so......

Re:Microsoft?

[Gr8Apes]

To complete your analogy, you'd need the "club owners" to also own 98% of all TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, and any other avenue of advertising. They disallow all advertizing for anything other than their own clubs.

Thus, even though the clubs "should" lose money, they don't, because the competition's capability to compete has been squashed because of their inability to be known by the customer, and all customers are funneled into the clubs, and hey, the clubs only serve the club owners whiskey, beer, wine, all substandard, and only plays music "owned" by the club owners, again not doing well in the market until the clubs opened. Now that only the owners clubs exist, well, they're not making as much money as they'd like, since there's still some money flowing into someone else's coffers, hey, restaurants! Well, the owners now open restaurants inside their clubs and the entire scenario starts again....

Hopefully you get the point why such a thing is bad? It has nothing to do with a business decision, it has to do with utilizing one monopolized market to control another. Losing money is irrelevant in this scenario, as soon your competition will shrivel up, not having their own monopoly to support them.

Re:Microsoft?

[Liselle]

Thank you for ending the analogy early. ;)

My objection is simple, and has nothing to do with their monopoly: they are pissing all over the work of Tim Berners-Lee and anyone else associated with the creation of the web as it was originally envisioned. Hacking apart standards so that you can have control is wrong, period. Either put your content up, or don't. Get out of my browser.

Re:Microsoft?

[southpolesammy]

The problem wasn't that the CSS settings didn't play well between the different browsers, but instead, Microsoft intentionally sent a set of broken CSS settings to browsers that identified themselves as Opera.

The author proved this by using wget with the user-agent strings set to emulate Opera, MSIE, and Netscape, and saved the output from the www.msn.com page for each user-agent. Content was indeed different for each user-agent, but the kicker was that the page returned for Opera contained a setting that forced it to display characters off the viewable page.

He further proved that it wasn't a bug in Opera by being able to both successfully display the msn.com pages retrieved for IE in the Opera browser, as well as to display the munged output retrieved for Opera in IE. In other words, the Opera-retrieved page for msn.com needed no tweaking other than what the IE-retrieved page received.

Given these results, I have a hard time believing that this is an honest mistake.

Re:Microsoft?

[m00nun1t]

You probably won't believe this, but the truth doesn't hurt.

I know the guy responsible for the "MSN Style sheet debacle". I know him well & trust him. The REAL truth? Like any other organisation, they can't test every single browser on the market, you well know there are hundreds. As any decent site does, they did their test matrix, with a defined cut off point, I think it was anything with more than .5% share (don't remember for sure if it was .5%) was in the matrix, if not, it was out. We all have finite test resources. Opera didn't even come close to .5% so it was off the test matrix. The guy who programmed it screwed it up, test didn't find it, it's that simple.

I think it was best said by cmdr taco himself: 'Never attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to stupidity'

Re:Microsoft?

[RedSteve]

But WHY would their generic sheet feed a declaration for unordered lists that called for the list to have a left margin that goes 30 pixels off the left side of the containing box (or page if the UL is a direct child of the body)? Even a poor css author would have a hard time pulling that declaration randomly out of his or her bodily orifice of choice. At the very least, it should have been caught during testing...if they wanted to provide any quality assurance at all.

Re:Microsoft?

[lazyl]

The key point that you're missing is that MSM.com's behaviour is designed to make the user think that Opera has serious bugs. There is certianly no justification for that.

Your analogy only works if MSN were to completely and visibly block Opera; which they actually tried with every non-IE browser a few years ago. That didn't work out for them.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why not just say "Opera 7 is being blocked by this server"?

Why did they have to make it look like the browser could not render the "special" page created only for the Opera 7 browser?

MS gave browser's identifying themselves as Opera 6 decent CSS code to make it look like there was a problem with Opera 7. This was CLEARLY INTENTIONAL and OBVIOUS.

12 Million dollars should only be a start in my opinion!

Re:Microsoft?

[zeptic]

An interesting fact about the article "Why doesn't MSN work with Opera" is that it's written by Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technology Officer for Opera.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

That instruction actually fixed the page in Opera 5. In short, the special style sheet was an attempt to fix bugs in Opera 5.

I love Opera myself, but that little episode was pure FUD.

Now if you want some pure anti-Opera stuff, visit this link in Vancouver's (admittedly crappy) Translink website. If you look at it in Opera ID=Opera you get a blank page, use ID=MSIE and it works. I've emailed their admins and they refuse to fix it.

Re:Microsoft?

[Keebler71]

easy there... while it is obvious that MS sent different CSS settings to different browsers (not a big deal), there is no proof that the Opera CSS was INTENTIONALLY BROKEN as you seem to claim. Intentionally different, but only the coder knows if he intentionally 'broke' the CSS settings or not. It is quite possible that different coders with appropriate backgrounds in the various browsers wrote seperate style sheets, and perhaps the Opera guy simply made a mistake. Just a thought.

Re:Microsoft?

[somethinghollow]

"you'd need the "club owners" to also own 98% of all TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, and any other avenue of advertising"

I may be wrong, but I don't think Microsoft owns 98% of all advertising methods on the Internet. Microsoft doesn't own word of mouth, and they don't own, AFAIK, DoubleClick, or OSDN's ad system.

I don't really pay attention to ads very much anymore, but I don't recall seeing any MSN.com ads (or Yahoo for that matter) in a while.

"Hopefully you get the point why such a thing is bad? It has nothing to do with a business decision, it has to do with utilizing one monopolized market to control another. Losing money is irrelevant in this scenario, as soon your competition will shrivel up, not having their own monopoly to support them. "

I don't know if other people look at portals the way I do. Just because it is the first thing that pops up on my screen doesn't mean I'll use it. Unlike pre-bundled vs downloaded software, it doesn't take much, if any, effort to go to another site. If I really like Yahoo, I'm not going to use MSN.com. If someone says, "Check out this site." I more than likely will take a look at it. In that respect, it's probably easier to sway people away from MSN.Com than it would be to sway them from Bill Gates' Bar.

And I'm not sure if I should mention this since it may or may not be pertinite to the the great grandparent (I think)... At any rate, I think I may have skirted the issue. What it comes down to is: Is MSN.com (Bill Gates' Bar) worth changing your browser (identity) for? There are only a handful of browsers that charge for their product. The problem, I think, was that MSN.com locking out Opera would lead to lost revenue for Opera (otherwise, why sue, assuming they did?). Assuming I bought the browser and I got locked out of MSN, I'd use another portal, not stop supporting Opera. While MSN can take the hit, MSN loses the revenue, not Opera.

Re:Microsoft?

[bgarcia]

It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.

This wasn't an issue of sending a different stylesheet to non-IE browsers. RTFA. The Opera folks tried changed the user agent string to some non-existent browser name, and ended up getting the same content as IE! So MS specifically targeted the Opera browser with the bad style sheet.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you on crack? Did you even read the grandparent?

Re:Microsoft?

[Richard_at_work]

From what I can remember from the previous story on this, when it happened, was that the stylesheet broke only certain later versions of opera, but worked perfectly for prior versions. So i guess that there was a bug in previous versions of opera that was fixed, and the stylesheet issue was noticed before the MSN webdeveloper remembered about it and updated the stylesheet selection rules.

Re:Microsoft?

[somethinghollow]

I agree. I'm a web designer, and an elitest about it as well. Unfortunately, not every browser adheres to the W3C standards. That is why we say Mozilla is the most standards compliant, not Mozilla IS standards compliant. No one will ever be perfect. Until someone is, we'll have to do the occasional inelegant hack (a.k.a. Hacking apart standards) to make things cross-browser compatible in order to deliver content. We all do this "wrong, period," thing, just Microsoft is using it for its own supposed gain.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why did it work fine in Opera 6 Mr Balmer?

Pull the other leg ... it might play "Jingle Bells"!

Re:Microsoft?

[levik]

I'm not saying that the generic CSS wasn't bad. While there is a chance that they tested it to work against some arcane browser, that chance is pretty slim. However, Opera at the time used their "Oprah" test to "prove" that they are being specifically targeted by MSN, and that a nonexistant browser got "valid" css while they did not.

My point is that MSN probably sent ALL 3RD TIER BROWSERS the bad CSS, not just Opera. Changing "Opera" to "Oprah" had the same effect as changing the UA to a strictly MSIE 6 string.

Re:Microsoft?

[DaveJay]

You know, you're right.

The problem here isn't Opera incompatibility -- it's artificial incompatibility with ANY browser that fakes MSIE compatibility.

After all, you said it yourself: MSIE == sheet #1, unidentified browsers with no MSIE faking == sheet #1, identified browser(s) with MSIE faking == broken sheet #2.

Once upon a time, alternative browser users visited sites and the sites broke because the browsers weren't identifiable. Later, alternative browsers pretended to be MSIE, and got through to those sites. I guess this is MSIE's way of pushing back, saying essentially "you may have found a trick that works on other sites, but you're not going to be able to do it on ours!"

The one thing I wonder is this: what happens when you change the browser ID string in Opera to read as Opera, versus the "identify as MSIE 5.0"?

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

But if MSN was deliberately breaking Opera -- why not do the same to Netscape and Mozilla?? After all, they're more of a market threat than Opera. And why restrict the breakage to Opera7? That doesn't seem to have much point. And Opera's own analysis page says the CSS sent to Opera*6*, and to Netscape, was NOT broken.

Given that, it does look like a case of stupidity rather than malice. There's not much point in only breaking a single version of a minority browser, especially when that version is still so new as to be not yet widely adopted even by its fans.

I'd guess someone at MSN tested their CSS with a broken beta of Opera7, and built an Opera7-specific CSS to account for said breakage, but never tested again with the release version.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Had you read the Opera article about the style sheet problem, you would see that it was not in response to a bug in Opera 5.

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

I had a similar thought (posted upstream in this thread), because there's really no point in locking out just ONE version of ONE minor browser -- if you're going to break browsers on purpose, start with Mozilla and Netscape, and pick on ALL versions of Opera, not just v7! So my speculation was likewise that the broken CSS was in fact an attempt to work around a bug in an early beta of Opera7, which didn't get fixed because no one got around to testing the site in the release version of Opera7.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, of course Opera will put their own spin on things. The fact is, it's quite possible that stylesheet was written as a somewhat clumsy workaround for Opera 5. As a programmer, I thought of putting a similar fixing myself. MS was clumsy to not fix the fix when newer versions of Opera came out, but we all know that MS is just as famous for their clumsiness as other wrongdoings.

In this case, the FUD-machine was purely Opera.

Re:Microsoft?

[BrokenHalo]

Agreed, but I still say the content (such as it is) is the same.

Re:Microsoft?

[prescot6]

Their proof is meaningless specifically because there is no "Oprah" browser - this means that any detection mechanism that they encountered treated "Oprah" UA as IE6. I cannot think of any other MSIE-pretenders off the top of my head, but if there are known ones out there, I am sure MSN would have sent these browsers the "generic" stylesheet as well.

This is a terrible argument. I don't know how much of what you said earlier in your post is true, but you definitely contradict yourself in the end. You say that MSN classifies browsers into IE, Moz, and Other. You say that Opera just falls into the Other category. Fine, that's ok. But then you say that Oprah doesn't exist, so it get's IE. Well, if it doesn't exist, then wouldn't it fall into Other?

And further, MSN should have good faith enough to say that if a browser tells me it's IE6, then it must want the IE6 page REGARDLESS of what else it may claim to be (since IE6 technology would _obviously_ be the best, eh?)

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a public transport conspiracy? TheTransperth website (Perth, Western Australia) has exactly the same "feature".

Re:Microsoft?

[poot_rootbeer]

Further, anyone who has ever done anything with style sheets would never feed that -30px declaration and expect anything productive to be done with it.

Maybe it was a typo, and was supposed to read -3px?

You still haven't convinced me that Microsoft's act was malicious, and not just negligent.

Re:Microsoft?

[Draknor]

I don't doubt you, but that doesn't explain why the site sent a stylesheet SPECIFICALLY for Opera - if Opera wasn't on their test matrix, why did they check for its UA and send it a special CSS?

I don't attribute this situation to malice, but I am curious to hear the chain of events that created the situation.

Re:Microsoft?

[RedSteve]

I might be inclined to agree that it could be negligence and ignorance of authoring CSS AND failing to test...if Microsoft hadn't tried similar shennanigans before.

Re:Microsoft?

[mrchaotica]

hmm... maybe you should ask him then why he doesn't just code to W3C standards, which should render correctly on all browsers without changes? Or at least let the default/unsupported page be W3C standard, if he insists on making a special one for broken/IE type browsers.

Re:Microsoft?

[HyperCash]

I don't know for sure but it might be because even if you lower the market share of Mozilla you're still not going to be able to kill it off while if you lower Opera's market share by enough the company will go under. Not saying its so, but with MS you can never be sure.

--HC

Re:Microsoft?

[spectecjr]

I'm an Opera zealot if there ever was one. The issue with MSN was absolutely infuriating. For those who didn't RTFA: MSN.com sent a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen, because it could only have been done intentionally.


Yes. It was done intentionally.

When you access MSN with an unknown browser, it defaults to Netscape 4.7-compatible layout mode.

Try it for yourself - put a random piece of text as your browser ID string in Mozilla, and see which files you get back.

Guess what? You get the Netscape 4.7 stuff.

Which doesn't render right in Opera.

This isn't particularly suprising - Netscape 4.7 was the fallback browser, because at the time it was still the 2nd most popular browser in the world.

See? No conspiracy theory needed.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if they are discriminatory, it isn't illegal. Private clubs have been excluding people based on race or gender for thousands of years, and still do. Women cannot become members of Augusta National, which is the home of the Masters Golf Championship (just in case you are not a golf fan). And there are hundreds of other examples around the world.

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

True, but in that case, why not lock out ALL of Opera's user base, rather than only the latest version? Seems kinda silly to me.

Someone else mentioned that Opera7's betas had buggy CSS handling, and my bet is that the MSN webmaster was trying to accomodate that, but never fixed it once Opera7 was final'd. In which case, we're all railing at the poor bloke for trying to be helpful (if somewhat behind).

But hey, never let it be said that slashdot considered an honest mistake as the culprit, when a conspiracy theory would do!

(As someone's sig puts it, *of course* it's slanted here. If it weren't, it would be |. )

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

: It could have been an honest mistake.

It couldn't have been a mistake. The page was specifically made for Opera, so they would have tested it in Opera, where they would have instantly noticed the mistake. There wasn't even any reason to make one specifically for Opera since the default one worked perfectly.

For it to have been a mistake, they would have had to make a typo in a page specifically designed for Opera without testing that page in Opera.

Re:Microsoft?

[HyperCash]

Hey, I'm not really a conpiracy theorist, I just play one on /.

Oh, and that sig you quoted was pretty damn funny.

--HC

Re:Microsoft?

[xsadar]

I assure you, MSN has done this to BOTH Netscape AND Opera countless times. I don't know about Mozilla, because I don't ever use it.

Re:Microsoft?

[KILNA]

Let's refine the analogy to add in monopolistic practices: Your club owns 98% of the commercial real estate suitable for running a night club. Your company also runs a clothing line. Your definition of "well dressed" means someone wearing only articles from your clothing line. The analogy has transformed from an example of the glories of a free market to something sinister and Orwellian.

Re:Microsoft?

[Brandybuck]

For it to have been a mistake, they would have had to make a typo in a page specifically designed for Opera without testing that page in Opera.

Well of course! But since when have you ever heard of any web developer testing their page in anything but Internet Explorer (if indeed, they even bother to test)?

Re:Microsoft?

[Brandybuck]

The only thing the MSN guys did wrong was not testing with Opera 7 before it was released.

Microsoft's hostility towards testing could explain a heck of lot...

Re:Microsoft?

[Brandybuck]

That wikipedia has a page for Opera the browser is sad. That wikipedia has a page for Opera the browser that is four times more extensive than the page for Opera the artform makes me fear for the future of civilization.

That an anonymous coward in Slashdot would consider wikipedia to be an reliable source of information is par for the course.

Re:Microsoft?

[Gr8Apes]

This was to complete the analogy of MS's general tactics and why they're wrong. It's what they're attempting to do. I didn't say it would work in the case of MSN.

The only reasons it's worked so well so far (they do have almost 30% of the market according to this article) is that most people aren't technically savvy, so when they see MSN first, they get used to it, and by the time they figure out there's more, they're used to MSN and you know how much those folks like change.... Take a look at AOL, it's one of the main reasons it's still as big as it is.

Re:Microsoft?

[levik]

Opera's User Agent string roughly translated says this:

"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Opera".

Yes, it really says all these things.

A genuine IE User Agent String says:

"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6"

The ONLY way to tell genuine IE6 is to look for a browser that claims to be IE6, but DOES NOT claim to be one of the other browsers that are known to PRETEND to be IE6.

Opera is a known browser that pretends to be IE6. There assume there are also some more browsers X, Y and Z that are known to do the same thing. In that case, the only way to detect genuine IE6 would be to say

You are IE6 if you say "I am IE 6", unless you also say "I am Opera" or "I am X" or "I am Y" or "I am Z".

By changing "Opera" to "Oprah", the browser now says:

"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Oprah".

Since "Oprah" is not a browser known to pretend to be IE6, MSN assumes that it is the genuine thing, and shows it the IE6 specific CSS file.

I hope that clears it up for you.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera did get a special style sheet. But the point is that this isn't the only time. Recently, they did the same with MSNBC.com. It's called a "pattern". The Bork version was just a joke, but when MS does the same thing again and again and again, Opera apparently decides to take action, and is offered a settlement.

So STFU unless you have something of value to add.

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

I keep my tinfoil hat polished up for use here too; after all, you never know when you'll need it! :D

Yeah, that sig cracks me up too -- it's almost enough to make a person register pipedot.org, just because :)

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

I know they've done it -- for a while I had to use a backdoor link to get my Netscape into their blasted knowledge base, cuz only IE5 and later were allowed -- search.microsoft.com worked regardless, and so did everything BUT their front page.

But it seems ridiculous to lock out ONE version -- that practically screams "stupid error" rather than "we hate Opera users".

Obligatory google cache

[Randar the Lava Liza]

Why is it the most interesting link is always /.'d first? Ah well, here's the "something to do with this" link cache.

Re:Obligatory google cache

[Ubi_NL]

And, of course, the follow-up

Anything to do with browser technology...

[manavendra]

...and you can bet your last dollar you'd hear Microsoft has something to do with - and quite sadly it usually ends up on the wrong side - patent infrigements, monopolistic policies, etc..

Light on the content aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's Opera's press page.

Nary a word about it.

But hey, don't let that stop you from flaming Microsoft.

Re:Light on the content aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the Opera president just bought himself a whole handful of OPERA stock just before the news hit the wires here.

And they say SCO is gaming the stock market.

Re:Light on the content aren't we?

[KjetilK]

I think that the linked page is not a press release, it's a stock exchange filing. And that's probably the only thing they wanted to say about it, if it hadn't been for the press.

Way too funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only who has that German article come up completely out of wack in Mozzila?

Re:Way too funny

[graaah]

german? :-|

Re:Way too funny

[zeroclip]

It's Not german! and it works just fine in FireFox! :)

Slashdotted - pay up

[GatorMan]

In related news, OSDN/Slashdot to pay 'cost of loss' for the disrepectful way in which, after posting a link to Opera's site, the server melted in less than 8 comments.

Re:Slashdotted - pay up

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I wouldn't expect something under opera.com to be slashdotted that fast... Maybe now with the extra money they can buy some servers as well...

Re:Slashdotted - pay up

[Lostie]

It's a good thing that Opera make web browsers rather than web servers then ;)

Re:Slashdotted - pay up

[greenhide]

Which is why it's always a good idea to actually go ahead and spell out what a link is pointing to.

Now that the pages are slashdotted, anyone who hasn't read the page yet want to make a guess about what "something to do with this" is actually about?

I mean, I applaud the unique way of setting up the links, I really do. I just now have absolutely no idea why Microsoft may or may not have paid up.

More information is needed...

[WordODD]

I really enjoy the Opera interface, but I am a FireFox diehard as many other people here are, so I wonder why Opera? Why not FireFox, or one of the others, Mozilla, etc. etc.? I'm sure its Slashdotly correct to assume that MS and the MSN website issue are the reason for this money but perhaps its something much less sinister. Mod me down if you want but I think putting something like this on the front page is just spreading unnessecary FUD.

Re:More information is needed...

[rborek]

I use both Opera and Firefox. The one thing Opera has going for it is that it has a better caching system - going forwards and backwards. See Bug 38486 for information on this. Firefox (and Mozilla) are dog slow when going forwards or backwards, because it reloads the entire page and re-parses everything. Opera is instantaneous. Even IE is faster.

That said, I hate Opera's handling of history and typed-in links - it's slow, they show up in alphabetical order (if you type in part of a URL - otherwise I think it's random) and it's a FIFO system (so it's not based on last-visited or number of times visited or anything like that). Opera also seems to have more problems rendering content, and actually crashes more often than any of the Firefox nightlies.

Re:More information is needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried to use FireFox, but it doesn't seem to work well with anything connected with Microsoft. We use Outlook for mail at work. When I try to use FireFox to read my Outlook mail from home, the pages don't display correctly and a few key features don't work. An accident? I think not.

Re:More information is needed...

[hkmwbz]

Why Opera? Small (both footprint and download), fast, works on lower-end systems, real Small Screen Rendering as seen on mobile devices, the M2 email client, which is rather unique, built in... No need to download countless extensions to mimic features that are already there when you install Opera. Integration between those features, instead of some random unrelated extensions doing their own thing and adding clutter to the UI. Then again, with Firefox you can do just about anything by installing extensions, and the interface is a lot cleaner by default. Why Opera? If Opera does what you need, then use Opera. If not, use something else.

"I'm sure its Slashdotly correct to assume that MS and the MSN website issue are the reason for this money but perhaps its something much less sinister."

Yeah, I'm sure any company would be willing to hand out several million dollars just to keep someone quiet and not go to court. And this company is one which is not a customer or partner of Opera, it's got nothing to do with patents or anything like that. So it is probably a competitor. But who has done bad things to Opera anyway? The Mozilla Project surely cannot pay this kind of money. AOL? The ones who took over Netscape when IE had already won the browser war anyway?

For chrissakes, this is Slashdot. Someone submits an interesting story about a newspaper speculating about Microsoft doing evil again. Big deal. It's not like Microsoft has a good reputation to uphold here on Slashdot anyway.

If it's something much less sinister, why would they be willing to pay this kind of money for it? And not only that, what much less sinister company could afford it?

So yeah, again, this is Slashdot. We like to bash MS. Why? Because, quite frankly, they deserve to be bashed. And they keep proving that again and again. It's an OSS site. It reports on bad things and rumors about Microsoft. It always has. If that bothers you, then perhaps Slashdot is not the site for you?

After all, there are plenty of pro-MS zombies out there running sites that spread FUD on behalf of MS. Why aren't you out there bashing Paul Thurrott's FUD against Apple? SCO's FUD against FOSS? The numerous journalists who are nothing but kiss-asses for Microsoft?

Slashdot is an OSS community site which happens to post about interesting stories and rumors affecting nerds and geeks everywhere. You may not like it, but then perhaps Thurrott's Win SuperSite is more down your alley...

Re:More information is needed...

[Tiram]

Neither Mozilla nor Opera are serious competition for Microsoft on the desktop, but Opera is a very serious competitor for MS on devices and mobile phones, and devices and phones is where the money is, after all. That's why Opera.

Re:More information is needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Start Opera
2. Go to www.homestarrunner.com
3. Click on "sbemail" at the bottom
4. Hit "F11" to get full screen display.
5. Hit "KP_+" until the sbemail just about fills your entire screen.
6. Select an episode, and enjoy it the way it was meant to be enjoyed!

Re:More information is needed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use both Firefox and Opera but prefer Opera because I like my address bar at the bottom of the page instead of the top and it seems faster as well.

Regards,
AC

Re:More information is needed...

[cgenman]

Opera's instantaneous forward and back is great, and the thing I miss most when switching back and forth between that and FireFox. It also caches typed-in fields, like Slashdot posts, so that you can drift off, come back, and pick up where you left off. Dropped posts can also be retrieved.

I also really like opera's command-line style address bar. Want to google something? Try "g something." Amazon? "z something" Ebay? "e something." Fatwallet, whois, and wayback searches are easy to setup, as is anything which uses post or address-based searching. This was borrowed from iCab, but what a borrow.

Opera also has undo enabled for closed tabs, a surprisingly small and useful touch, which I really miss in Firefox. Automatic page saving (since 3.x, which btw REALLY needed it) makes crashes relatively painless, as you can pick up where you left off.

I find Opera these days crashes about as often as FireFox, though that always changes with every big release. Content rendering is not really an issue these days, except for the occasional I.E. only page. But you can add an "Open in I.E." button to your toolbar which will do exactly what it sounds like.

The history page is really annoying, as if you re-visit a page it will jump to the top of the history, rather than showing up where it was first discovered. Why is it such a problem to have a page in a history twice? My phone does the same thing, and it makes it impossible to call back the xth person who called you, as they could be any of the numbers in front of it.

The wand seems to become more buggy with every release, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll eventually fix it. They always do.

My main gripe would have to be that the interface gets more and more cluttered as features keep getting added. Fast forward and rewind? Who uses these? It's totally customizable, but even that process of customization can be overwhelming if you are new to the browser.

Anyway, I find it to be a worthy tool in the toolbox, and I prefer it over the other available browsers... on Windows, at least.

Re:More information is needed...

[po8]

Why target Opera and not an open source browser? Because Opera can be driven out of business.

An OSS browser will keep developing and improving as long as there's a dozen people using it: Opera needs to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year to pay the bills. Microsoft understands how to deal with traditional business competition, and does it well. It's harder to know what to do with OSS: high-risk (of negative publicity) low-return (doesn't do much) attacks are probably a bad idea.

Great...

[Bishop, Martin]

Now that they have a hefty some of money, maybe Opera should realise their browser would be a lot better if they just open source it.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL is all. Must drink cool-ade.
Resistance is futile.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe Opera should realise their browser would be a lot better if they just open source it.

Why? Please provide evidence. In the likely event that you have no evidence, please provide anecdotes. In the event that you have no anecdotes, please at least provide some sort of theory or argument to support your claim.

If you want an open source browser, use Mozilla or FireFox. If there are features in Opera which they lack, well, they're open source, so you can add them!

Re:Great...

[evil-osm]

I really fail to see your argument here. Opera is a fantastic browser and generally is the first to provide new technologies (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, mouse gestures). Mozilla and other open source browsers also eventually added them as well, however Opera pioneered alot of them. Opera is also very very stable, intuitive, and extreamly fast. The only complaint I have is that not all sites (1 in ~40) don't work exactly as they should. Not a huge deal, however as they activly fix the browser if you post up sites that don't work. Open sourceing everything isn't always "the solution" (in some cases it is), and if you plan on complaining about why they are not open source, perhaps you should also provide reasons why you think that they should be. Never complain without something to A) back it up, and B) some sort of positive solution and reasons why the solution would work.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh totally! then they can sell support for it, and pay even more mortgages and kids-going-back-to-school bills then before!!!

you income generating genius!!!

SCO

[randomErr]

I think SCO was threating legal action and they smacked them down like the dogs they are. Just my opinion.

Re:SCO

[spektr]

I don't think so. SCO only sues to generate news. We didn't read anything about SCO and Opera before, hence it wasn't SCO who paid.

Re:Is There..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's probably Norwegian since Opera is an Norwegian company.

You'd be wrong

[Chuck Chunder]

Opera always has the word "Opera" in it UA string no matter what it identifies as.
The masquerading is only intended to allow Opera to work with sites that don't know about Opera (ie foolishly test for only IE or Netscape and throw an "unsupported" browser otherwise). It isn't intended to hide the fact it's Opera for sites that know about it.

Re:You'd be wrong

[nine-times]

But wasn't part of the whole scandal that the MSN page rendered properly in Opera if Opera identified itself as IE?

Re:You'd be wrong

[bhtooefr]

No - it was looking for the word "Opera" in the UA, and Opera IDs itself in much the same way that Feedreader does - Basically, Moz4 compatible, IE6, Windows version (really weird when you see IE6 on X11, which is what Opera gives), Opera.

Re:You'd be wrong

[warriorpostman]

I bank at Washington Mutual, and use their online system a lot (www.wamu.com). The thing that's really frustrating is they check for IE and Netscape in their JavaScript, and if it's neither of those, they throw you an error page saying your browser is not secure. This is just crap.

If they don't want to support Opera, then they should say, we only want our customers to use Netscape and IE, but to throw an error at you saying your browser doesn't support SSL and 128-bit encryption, is highly disingenuine.

And in related news...

[Sheepdot]

... slashdot pays a few million to an unknown company with apologies for driving their bandwidth to the ground.

Full text (sorry, no pictures):

Why doesn't MSN work with Opera?
[Update Feb 7: After this page had been referenced by Cnet, The Register and Slashdot, MSN changed their setup so that Opera7 no longer receives the distorted style sheet. Opera6, however, still does]

Microsoft and MSN have a history of trying to stop people from using the Opera browser. When trying to access MSN.com using the Opera browser, there are two visible problems. First, for the user it looks like Opera has a serious flaw so that many lines are partially hidden. Second, the page shows less content than users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (MSIE) see.

The purpose of this page is to document, in technical terms, what is going on. Did the Opera programmers make grave mistakes? Or is it something wrong on the MSN site? If so, is the Opera browser targeted specifically? (Executive summary: no, yes, yes)

To analyze the problem, the first step is to download the files as they are served to the browsers. When requesting a page, the browser sends along a "User-Agent" string which makes it possible for the server to identify which make and version the browser is. Here are the User-Agent strings used by the three browsers (when running on Windows XP) in this test:

Browser User-Agent string
Opera 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]
MSIE 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Netscape 7.01 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01

When downloading pages, browsers sometimes modify the content before saving the pages to disk. For comparison purposes it is therefore important to use another to fetch the files. In this test "wget" was used. The table below shows the files fetched by "wget" when told to identify as Opera7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01, respectively. The test was run around 2PM Oslo time on Feb 5, 2003.

Files Bytes Command used to fetch file
opera7.html 39436 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" --output-document opera7.html http://www.msn.com
msie6.html 37253 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" --output-document msie6.html http://www.msn.com
ns7.html 37379 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01" --output-document ns7.html http://www.msn.com

As can be seen in the table above, each browser is sent different HTML files. If you open the files in your browser of choice, you will see that that the file sent to Opera7 has less content in (although it is bigger) than the version sent to the Microsoft and Netscape browsers.

To understand why there are differences, we need to peek inside the HTML files. This part of the analysis is quite time-consuming, but by now we have some experience. It turns out that MSN sends different style sheets to the different browsers. This can be seen in the first LINK element of each of the three files. The style sheets are:

Browser File Bytesize Command used to fetch file
Opera 7.0 site.css 521 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" --output-document site.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css
MSIE 6.0 site-win-ie6.css 2036 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" --output-document site-win-ie6.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-win-ie6.css
Netscape 7.01 site-all-nav6.css 1926 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01" --output-document site-all-nav6.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-all-nav6.css

As can be seen in the table above, Opera7 receives a style sheet which is very different from the Microsoft and Netscape browsers. Looking inside the style sheet sent to Opera7 we find this fragment:

makes sense

[sofar]

Microsoft has a lot to lose and taking down opera (or being caught doing something that looks like that) would seriously hurt their current EU legal status (monopolizing a competitor on the browser market). I'm sure microsoft will have settled this on very strict terms with Opera.

Opera however can use the funds to publicise itself FAIR wihtout slandering M$. That would be the wiser choice.

Re:makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a legal case, regardless of whether they settled out of court, the names of all parties must be open for review.

Maybe open courts isn't how the system works in Norway?

Re:makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has a lot to lose and taking down opera (or being caught doing something that looks like that) would seriously hurt their current EU legal status (monopolizing a competitor on the browser market)

Of course they do and the reason is: they've been caught doing it before! Now if, as the grandparent of this post suggests, that is flaming Microsoft, then FLAME ON!

Re:makes sense

[advocate_one]

It never came to court... but there's an easy way to check if it is Microsoft... a sum of that magnitude should be on the relevant SEC filing shortly.

more links

[grusapa]

http://www.computerworld.no/index.cfm?fuseaction=a rtikkel&id=97D7699C-E40D-042A-58AA70FC9F31DE52 http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=104271 they are in norway.. but it whith ms.. who else can it be??

Simple trick to kill Opera

[vijaya_chandra]

MS might not be able to kill opera but OSDN get

How!?!

Just get opera.com /.ed every alternate day
they'd end up paying their yearly profits for the monthly internet bill

Re:Simple trick to kill Opera

[vijaya_chandra]

:s/OSDN get/OSDN can

Re:Is There..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually its in norwegian - which by the way looks a lot like danish, only horrible spelled...

Thomas

Dont Forget!

[Anonymous Coward]

The $3,000 per hour in legal fees! Once again Bill gets Micro$hafted!

Secret User Agent Man

[falsemover]

This isn't new. Morally nebulous web site owners around the world configure their sites to check the user agent and if they detect a search engine like Google, they send a page that will 'spamdex' the Google search results; a page that with keyword laden or otherwise garbage to the user but optimized for search. The temptation to corrupt the fair process of serving the same info to everyone is irrisistable, especially when there is money to be made from a well ranked mortgage/gambling/casino/hi risk loan/no credit card refused type site. Hypocritically, this appears to work in reverse for vendors like Microsoft. Although they don't like users spamdexing their search engines based on user agent discrimination; they are more than happy to serve the same flavor of evil to help sqash a competitor in their marketplace.

Re:Is There..

[Hansu]

And since Opera Software is a Norwegian company, I doubt they'd make a press release only in danish :-)

Translated Text from dagbladet.no

[hyfe]

Translating properly is hard.. but I'll give it a try just for the heck of it :)

Headline: Secret Million-settlement

Picturetext: MSN: This is how the broken MSN looked like.

Ingress: An american company must pay one year of earnings(one year of opera's earning that is, the sentence was unclear in norwegian too) to Opera software. Why is a secret.

(Dagbladet.no): Opera software has just reached a settlement in a legal dispute with an american company. According to a stockmarket note issued today, the compensation given to Opera was 89 millions.

The company was not one of Operas existing customers.

- We have presented a few fact against this company. We agreed to avoid taking this court. A part of the bargain is not telling which company this is, says technical manager Håkon Wium Lie in Opera software to dagbladet.no

- Is this about the mobilephone reader or the pc-version?

- This issue is not a pirating or patent issue. In the settlement we do not give away any rights concering our products, and we shall continue making good products, says Lie.

It was after a substantial amound of documentation was sent over to the american company that the settlement came to be. As a consequence, this will not come before the court.

Last year Opera made 78 million kroners (about 10 million dollars). This settlement therefor equals one year of revenues.

- However, this year our ambitions are far greater, claims Lie.

Accusing Microsoft

Dagbladet.no doesn't know which company entered the settlement with Opera. It is however formerly known that since 2001 Microsoft have been blocking out Opera customers on purpose from their net pagers.

On his private webpages Wium Lie have in detalj explained what happens when a user enters the netpage msn.com with Opera.

He has documented that MSN sends a seperate version of their pages that looks worse on Opera and Netscape. On these pages, the page looks broken and weird. Among other things, part of the content is being placed outside the margin. MSN fixed the error after being by Opera, however older version still have trouble.

Read also: 'ditch Internet Explorer'

Re:Translated Text from dagbladet.no

[Anonymous Coward]

In the settlement we do not give away any rights concering our products, and we shall continue making good products, says Lie.

Anyone else have trouble trusting that guy?

Quick and dirty translation of the article

[venomix]

Here's a quick translation of the norwiegan article. I'm Swedish so nor my english or my norwiegan is perfect, but you should get the picture.

[translation]
Secret millon-dollar settlement

An american company will pay about a years revnue to Opera Software. The reason is secret.

Opera software has recieved a sum of money after entering a settlement with an american company. According to a press release that Opera send out today, the settlement has given the company a compensation of 89 million norwiegian kroner (NOK).

The company is not one of operas existing customers.

- We have laid forth some facts against a company. We have agreed not to take this to court. It's also a part of the settlement that we
don't tell which the involved company is, says the technical director Håkon Wium Lie of Opera software to Dagbladet.no

- Is this about the cellphone browser or the
pc browser?

- It's not about piracy or patents. We don't give
up any rights in the settlement and we will
continue to deliver good products, Lie says.

It was efter sending a large amount of documents to the american company that the settlement was reached. Thereby this issue won't go to court.

Last year Opera made of profit of 78 million NOK. The settlement thereby brings in a years profit to Opera.

- Although this year we have widely larger ambitions, says Lie.
[/translation]
The rest is just about the old msn/opera issue.

Re:Quick and dirty translation of the article

[advocate_one]

Last year Opera made of profit of 78 million NOK. The settlement thereby brings in a years profit to Opera.

nice to know they've effectively got my money twice then...

Bort! Bort!

[shrapnull]

Opera is a class act. Their sense of humor in this whole thing kept it interesting. BORT! They're the perfect example that you don't have to be "free" to compete with Microsoft. Plus they make a better product.

Link from The Register

[Anonymous Coward]

Contains no more info, but in english so Americans can read it too.. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/18/opera_lega l/

Re:Link from The Register

[ydrol]

Contains no more info, but in english so Americans can read it too.. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/18/opera_lega l/

And other English reading people (After all it is www.theregister.co.uk)

Note Capitals - despite best efforts :)

Lordy

Re:Link from The Register

[huie]

Okay, why is this headline visible on The Register's main page but not from their desktop news panel? Is this just not a big headline?

Thanks, now I'll remember to ignore the desktop news panel since it's useless.

Re:Microsoft? Bork!

[Sidlon]

It should be noted, that Opera's initial response to MS's clear disregard for web standards was perhaps the funniest move ever by a tech company.

Just ask the Swedish Chef...

No, it's a settlement with Oprah Winfrey

[AtariAmarok]

No, it's a settlement with Oprah Winfrey. If the googol guys can sue Google....

No

[Chuck Chunder]

As the link clearly shows.
Using Operas "IE" identity (the ones with MSIE in them) Opera got sent Opera specific stylesheets.
When they changed Opera to Oprah they got the MS IE stylesheet. Thus the site was specifically looking for the word "Opera" in the UA string before sending the screwed up style sheet.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thus the site was specifically looking for the word "Opera" in the UA string before sending the screwed up style sheet"

So how come a bit further down he says that it renders fine in previous versions of Opera? Is it looking for Opera or Opera 7?

Re:No

[birder]

That's right. It specifically targetted Opera 7.0. Opera 6 worked fine.

Re:Microsoft? Bork!

[JediTrainer]

Hehe. I had the pleasure of being the author of the JavaScript code they used to do that.

They contacted me a few days before asking permission to use it, but I had no idea what they had been planning. Imagine my surprise! :)

Re:Microsoft Borked

[SkjeggApe]

One of the funniest things about this whole issue was when Opera released a version of their browser that "translated" the MSN page into "Sveedish Chef" (bork, bork), just to show that two could play the "alternate versions of content" game.

Here's their press release about it:
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/

It's Norwegian, here's the article.

[kunudo]

Secret settlement

An american company has to pay the equivalent of one years profits to web-browser company Opera.

credit: JAN THORESEN@dagbladet

(Dagbladet.no): Opera Software has gained a nice chunk of cash after settling a case in american courts. According to a notice to investors the company sent out today,
the company has agreed to pay Opera 89 million kroner ($1 = ~6.8 NOK)

The company is not a customer of Opera Software.

- We have presented a list of facts about a company, and we have reached an agreement with said company to handle this out of court. It is also a part of the settlement that we do not disclose the name of this company, says technical director at Opera, Håkon Wium Lie.

- Is this settlement over the WAP browser or the regular Web browser?

- This is not a matter of piracy or patents. We do not surrender any rights with this settlement, and we will of course concentrate on continuing to produce good products, says Lie.

Last years revenue for Opera was 78 million NOK, almost the size of this settlement.

- But we have bigger ambitions for next year, says Lie.

Has previously accused Microsoft

Dagbladet.no is not aware of which company this settlement is with. However, it is known that Opera has accused Microsoft since 2001 of intentionally blocking users of opera from using their web services, including MSN.com, by sending a special broken version to users accessing their websites using Opera.

On his private webpages, Lie details what happens when MSN.com is accessed using Opera. Among other things, the CSS breaks the page, and so does weird use of HTML. When accessing the page with Opera, using a fake useragent, it looks normal. The "mistake" has been corrected after Opera pointed it out to microsoft.


Somewhat direct translation. Enjoy.

Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

To retailiate, here's some PHP code to block or redirect MSIE users, if you're interested:

<?php
$agent="MSIE";
global $HTTP_USER_AGENT;
if ($ie!="true") {
if (strpos($HTTP_USER_AGENT,$agent) == true) {
header("Location: http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']). "/" ."msie.php");
$ie="true";
exit();
}
}
?>

To implement:

1. Place this at the top of your web pages and make sure they all have the .PHP extention.

2. Create a file called msie.php and provide links to www.opera.com and www.mozilla.org and explain why they are seeing this page.

3. Pass the ?msie=true setting to all of your internal links so that the code is bypassed for MSIE users.

4. Use an if statement to direct MSIE users to a different style sheet if you wish to give them a watered-down version of your site.

An example of a site that blocks MSIE.

Have fun.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

Oops -- that variable should be ?ie=true instead of ?msie=true.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't block out MSIE. That's stooping to the level of SCO and gives MS more ammunition for their fight against other software institutions: "look, Firefox and OSS is run by a bunch of kiddies, do you want to trust your company's IT system to a bunch of juvenile delinquents?"

A better approach is to display the page, but also include a well-visible note that explains how MSIE is inferior/insecure and the user should switch to an alternative such as Firefox and Opera.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Shinglor]

Why not just use the correct content-type (application/xhtml+xml)? AFAIK almost all browsers support it except IE and it's a W3C recommendation.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Reziac]

I use Mozilla with a User-Agent toolbar, specifically to deal with sites that only do a dumb string check for User-Agent.

Set to "real UA" your site works fine.
Set to "IE", it redirects as specified.

Note that it is locking out MOZILLA if it *calls* itself IE.

IOW, your lockout script is just as broken as IE, because it only does a UA-string check, not a browser capabilities check.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame that www.herotale.com looks crap no matter what browser it's viewed in...

Re:Block out MSIE

[pla]

I use Mozilla with a User-Agent toolbar, specifically to deal with sites that only do a dumb string check for User-Agent.

Could you post a link, please (Or enough info to search for it on Google)?

I've wanted exactly such an option for quite a while, and although I've tried a couple, none worked well (awkward, or just had no effect). I think sometime around Mozilla 1.4, they broke a lot of the older interface stuff (from the backward compatibility POV, I don't really consider it "broken"), so older themes and other cool add-ons (such as a UA toolbar) no longer work.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Reziac]

According to its Credits thingee, I got it at http://www.xulplanet.com/aaron/

It hasn't been updated in a long time, but at the time it was the only one I found that didn't have tons of irrelevant/useless baggage. It works mostly okay with Moz 1.5, which is what I'm still using:

It also has an instant flash killer (but no "load on demand" function), and on/off checkboxes for image loading, javascript, and site-specified colours. The on/off checkboxes and the UA setting all work perfectly, tho the flash killer only works intermittently -- I think it gets bolluxed when UA is changed, or may rely on flash being served in some particular way??

I was really longing for one-touch on/off for images and js (two functions I enjoy in my preferred old NS3.04, which I still use MOST of the time) -- hate to root thru a prefs menu every time I want to turn 'em on/off! For me, this toolbar improved Moz from "I really *really* hate it" to "I can put up with it if I have to".

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

The PHP script above doesn't keep MSIE users from viewing the site, it only redirects them to a page which asks them to use a different browser or view a version of the site with a "lite" style sheet with standards-based yet non-MSIE compatible functions.

It lets people know that MSIE is not standards-based and that there are better alternatives out there. This is precisely what the MSN website does when you try to view one of their news videos -- Windows/IE only, with links to download IE or buy Windows.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[Blakey Rat]

And the Macintosh version of IE which supports CSS correctly and is a pretty damned good browser in its own right? Why would you force Macintosh users to switch browsers when the one they're using has no rendering errors and no security holes?

Microsoft does make good browsers, just not on Windows. This code just makes you into an asshole to Mac users.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Reziac]

Or maybe a better link, http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/

(Somehow missed that when I was looking in the credits last go-round)

Re:Block out MSIE

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I agree with blocking IE users, but there's a much much easier way of doing it, no PHP required:

<!--[if IE]>
</html>
<![endif]-->

That's it. Conditionals are read only by Exploder, to other browsers they look like comments. Go ahead and just close the html tag and that should work (untested).

However, a much better use for the above would be to display a message saying something about how it's very dangerous for them to run IE, and that they should switch to something better, providing links to firefox (or opera if that's your poison).

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

Tough shit -- use Safari.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

Flash sometimes relies on JavaScript to detect the plugin version and redirect to an "install a newer Flash" page. This could be interfering with your Flash killer, as could a Flash graphic created with Swish or some other kind of Flash creation tool that identifies itself differently than the genuine Macromedia program.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[wheany]

It also blocks Opera that has been told to identify as IE. To fix that, you should also check that the user agent string doesn't contain the word "Opera."

Opera always adds that to the user-agent string, even when it is told to identify as another browser.

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

I didn't know that -- I thought it totally copied the MSIE string. I'll have to change the if statement to add that condition.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[kuzb]

Wow, that is the single most stupid thing I've read on slashdot today. Because MS *might* have taken some action against opera (unlikely, opera versions before 7 were horrible. It's no wonder it breaks. There is no return on investment to fix things for opera either, market share is too small - notice how opera isn't even IN their statistics, it's lumped with "other") you should CUT YOUR OWN BALLS OFF IN PROTEST.

MSIE is still the browser with the most market share in the world. Like it or not, we *need* to support it. Pages that break in IE will more likely be bypassed rather than the user getting a new browser.

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

Opera's stats are deceiving; by default it reports its user agent as MSIE.

I run three websites, and Opera accoutns for anywhere between 2% and 11% of traffic. The Herotale website that I gave as an example of the code in action had 20% of its traffic using MSIE before I enabled that code. Now it's a little less (about 15% MSIE) even though traffic has doubled since I switched the site from Flash to PHP/XHTML/CSS.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[Blakey Rat]

Uh, no, you're missing the point.

There's hundreds of thousands of computers running pre-X versions of MacOS (on which Internet Explorer is by far the best version), and there are thousands of them running OS X that have Internet Explorer set to the default browser. You're cutting off those browsers for no good reason whatsoever and the *worst* part is that you could probably just detecting them by looking for "PPC" in the user-agent string. (I think IE, Safari and other Macintosh browsers all send "PPC" in the string as opposed to "x86." I'm not a web designer; I may be mistaken.) Your script is broken, and it's pissing off a lot of people.

"Tough shit -- use Safari?"

My gut reaction to this is 'fuck off.' You've just convinced me, a potential customer, to never visit your site. Tough shit to you, huh?

Re:Block out MSIE

[ValourX]

RTFP -- the script redirects to an intermediate page which recommends different browsers and offers a reduced style sheet for IE viewing. You can view the site with IE, but you can't see the transparent menus because IE doesn't properly support alpha-blended PNGs.

Opera is available for MacOS (pre-OS X) last I checked (today).

Why should I code for five different browsers? I'm sick of the brokenness of IE, and even the Mac version of IE leaves out some CSS functionality as I recall from my Google searches before I wrote the script. I'd rather code to standards and exclude or reduce the programs that don't support the standards. If IE had been a major percentage of traffic I would have considered a different solution, but 20% of the traffic was not worth 50% more time coding workarounds and then installing Windows so that I could test it (I'm totally FreeBSD-based). And of that 20% virtually no visitors are using Apple machines, which I have absolutely no way to test browser compatibility with.

If you aren't interested in the book, then the site will be of no use to you anyway. I only posted it here as an example of the code as it is in use.

-Jem

Re:Block out MSIE

[mister_tim]

The forums on Australian broadband site Whirlpool show a good example of this. There's a sidebar you can open for watching the forums easily, but is not supported on IE. It's designed for Mozilla, but also works in Opera. And you gotta love the error message you get when you try to open it in IE...

Note: this doesn't break the site for IE users, but just denies them one piece of extra functionality

Re:Block out MSIE

[Reziac]

What happens when it fails, is that the flash loads anyway, and can't be killed. When the toolbar works, the flash loads, but is instantly killed when one clicks the appropriate button.

But I think you may be right, and I had a similar thought -- that whether it works might partly have to do with HOW the flash is loaded and whether the toolbar recognised the load process or not. Just haven't got around to looking into source on such pages. But I did notice that it quits entirely when UA is switched to IE for a while (and even after it's switched back), so it may be some bug interacting with how it detects flash loaders, who knows.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Blakey Rat]

IE for MacOS does properly support alpha-blended PNGs. So... uh... good research there.

Microsoft may be wrong but.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if Microsoft did do it on purpose is that really wrong?

Microsoft is a for profit company, they are not a public anything. They owe nobody anything. What if Google and Opera had a falling out. It would be well within Google's right to write code to specifically lock out users of that product. That is just how business works. If I run a garage I can blatantly refuse to work on your car if you drive a Ford because I do not like the company. You can do absolutely nothing about it as all as business in the US is considered private and has no legal responsibility to the public in term of who it will serve (Other then handicap people)

I agree it was dick of Microsoft to do but why should they have to adhere to laws other company do not.

Bitch and moan all you want and in the end realize that this is about the same as Microsoft suing Epson for designing a printer that will only have full functionality on a Mac. It is stupid and chilidish and I an disguted that Opera has resorted to legal mans to raise funds. They are now as low as SCO in my book.

Another interesting article

[The Wannabe King]

This aritcle is from a source that is far more reliable than Dagbladet, which is a tabloid newspaper of the worst sort. It's in Norwegian and says much the same as the Dagbladet article, but adds some paragraphs at the end (in bold) that are quite interesting. Translation follows:

[Digi.no is interviewing Håkon Wium Lie from Opera]

Digi.no reverses the question and asks whether Opera and Microsoft have had any contact on the coding of MSN. This ordinary question should give Lie no reason to be silent, but he refuses to answer.

He only says cryptically: "Microsoft has fixed a lot, but there are still some versions of Opera that won't work".

When digi.no asks "Can we expect that this is solved in the near future?", Lie says that he "unfortunately cannot comment on this."

Re:Another interesting article

[nordicfrost]

a tabloid newspaper of the worst sort.

That is fucking bullshit. I work for Dagbladets worst competitor and enemy and can say that they are as reliable as the other papers in Norway. A statement like the Wannabe tells is horribly wrong. In fact, there's just one paper in Norway that comes even close to the tabloids of England and USA, and that is the Søndag Søndag (Sunday, sunday) "paper".

Re:Another interesting article

[say]

You work for VG - and you call yourself reliable?? That's absolutely hilarious!!

What's your favorite TV channels? Fox News and Al-Jaseera?

Re:Another interesting article

[KjetilK]

Besides, Dagbladet's two main tech writers are regular /. readers. While they're not perfect, I don't find them any worse than digi.no.

Re:Another interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on! digi.no has a better reputation than Dagbladet? I don't think so...

It's not a legal case

[Chuck Chunder]

They came to the agreement without taking it to court according to the article.

Good

[mindfucker]

Sounds like they deserved it.

Now maybe the Mozilla Foundation, the World Web Consortium, and an us Web Developers can collectively sue Microsoft for deliberately breaking PNG, CSS, HTTP, and the other myriad Internet standards out there. I don't think large punitive damages are out of the question considering the wasted time and effort their sorry excuse for a web browser causes us in having to maintain two different versions of stylesheets and web-pages (IE and non-IE).
</rant>

The effect is the same as mentioned in the article, albeit, on a much broader scale.

Re:Good

[jesser]

Microsoft didn't "break PNG". It just chose not to support alpha transparency. The authors of the PNG spec wisely allowed implementors to "support transparency control partially, or not at all".

Re:Good

[mindfucker]

I said breaking standards, not breaking PNG. Please don't misquote me.

First of all, take a look at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-wi n-unix, and then look at the PNG support by every other major browser on that list. Every major browser there currently supports full alpha transparency, except IE (even in current 6.0 versions). When everyone except MS implements a standard uniformly, you'd have to be very naive to think that is just Microsoft "choosing not to support alpha transparency".

Full alpha transparency is hugely important so that anti-aliased text can appear smoothly on a transparent background.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html says:

This transparency feature is far more important for the small web graphics that are typically used on web pages, such as colored (circular) bullets and fancy text. Alpha blending allows one to use anti-aliasing--creating the illusion of smooth curves on a grid of rectangular pixels by smoothly varying the pixels' colors--to make rounded and curved images that look good against any background, not just against a white background (for example).

Christ, there is even a petition to get them to fix this: http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.htm l

Re:Good

[jesser]

I said breaking standards, not breaking PNG. Please don't misquote me.

You said "breaking PNG, CSS, HTTP, and the other myriad Internet standards out there". Quoting you as saying "breaking PNG" was not misquoting you.

Re:Good

[mindfucker]

You took what I said totally out of context. I did not just say "They broke PNG.", I said that they "broke PNG ... as an Internet standard." See the difference when it's in context? A standard is when everyone agrees to do something a certain way. And as I pointed out in my original reply to you, Microsoft's PNG support not only diverges but from this standard by not implementing full PNG alpha transparency on the Web (like every other major browser), but large parts of it are still broken by their own admission.

Your contention in your original reply that their implementation is somehow acceptable because the PNG spec allows what they do is ludicrous. It's like saying that it's OK to make an XML office document format all one big binary blob surrounded by brackets, because the XML specification allows for it.

Image mirror

[MBAFK]

I haven't managed to get all of the last image yet but I will update it as and when I do.

msie-on-opera6.png
msie-on-opera7.png
opera7.png

(The server is bo Akes powered - you can't /. it :)

Nominative Determinism

[Anonymous Coward]

... anyone else think it funny that the Opera spokesperson's surname is Lie ?

MSN wasn't doing anything illegal...

[blorg]

...just something that looked bad and was contrary to the spirit of web standards. I'm an Opera user myself, and occasionally come across sites that specifically redirect me to a 'blocked' page saying that they only support IE or Netscape and telling me to download one or the other. (The site usually ends up working fine in Opera.) I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for doing this.

Re:MSN wasn't doing anything illegal...

[DaveJay]

I work on a site that allowed Opera in, although it wasn't on the official browser support list. I made it a personal goal to make as much of the site Opera-compatible as possible.

Then, while I wasn't looking, another person "upgraded" the browser detection -- and the new system blocked Opera.

Once I found out, I added Opera detection back in...but it's worth noting that many of the Javascript browser detection scripts available for purchase or free reuse break Opera by default. Tsk.

Oh, and I also did my best to make sure it was compatible with Mozilla, even in Linux -- and it was. Then one day, we received a hostile email from a Linux user (via our clients, to whom it was sent) claiming that we had our heads up in our arses and such because we weren't allowing Linux Mozilla users in -- but we WERE. I had a box right there, and proved it to the client on the spot. To this day, I have no idea what was going on with that person's machine. Bluh.

Re:MSN wasn't doing anything illegal...

[totatis]

If a company does some stupid shit on their site, well, that's their problem.

However, if some convincted monopolist volontary block competitors' browsers, to protect its monopoly, then it's downright illegal.

Read the article. It is obvious that it is volontary.

Whatever

[LordKazan]

I write webpages for a living, and I work with stylesheets every bloody day. My stylesheets work on Mozilla (Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X), Netscape (Win, Lin, Mac), Opera (Win), IE (Win, Mac) - all with the same stylesheet! When there is a rendering error it's so trivial that it doesn't degrade from the webpage. oh yeah my stylesheets are css2 compliant

Re:Whatever

[BrokenHalo]

It's actually getting to the stage now where people are beginning to say that their pages render better in Mozilla (on Linux) than in IE on Windows.

Though a lot of that may be due to the advances that have been made with font rendering on Linux over the last year or two, which make text much clearer and easier to read than that on (most) Windows installations. I, for one, always find it a bit of a shock to see the jagged font rendering on the computers at my university (recent Dell machines with XP).

Re:Whatever

[LordKazan]

I've noticed that too

To sum up Asa's blog post...

[hkmwbz]

"Opera sucks because it isn't Firefox."

While that might reflect his personal opinion as a member of Mozilla.org, it certainly doesn't mean that he is right in his bias against Opera. After all, Opera offers a heck of a lot more useful stuff when installed than Firefox.

Just because it doesn't behave exactly like your favorite program, doesn't mean that it sucks! He might have something useful to say, but when he gives the impression that unless Opera is exactly like Firefox, it will always suck,

Oh, and the screenshot is totally wrong. That's not what Opera 7.5 looks like by default at all.

And finally, read this comment: "Posted by: sas on May 13, 2004 02:54 AM". It takes the piss, but it's rather spot on and proves a point. Anyone can make anything look bad by posting biased reviews like that.

Re:To sum up Asa's blog post...

[jesser]

Oh, and the screenshot is totally wrong. That's not what Opera 7.5 [opera.com] looks like by default at all.

If you choose non-targeted ads, it does look like Asa's screenshot (two navigation toolbars, etc).

Re:To sum up Asa's blog post...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. The navigation bar is not on by default.

Microsoft the humanitarian

[fleener]

Nonono, by keeping the payer's identity secret, *cough*, Microsoft doesn't have to live up to their past claims of needing to pass the cost onto consumers.

Keyboard shortcuts?

[DougMelvin]

Isn't that why they implemented "Mouse Gestures"?
One-handed surfing at it's best!!
It's also a rather fast browser.. just wish the javascript interface was a little better

ESPN.com has ditched web standards

[Compact Dick]

In 2003, ESPN.com was redesigned to be web standards-compliant. It rendered perfectly on browsers other than IE. Now they've ditched clean code and returned to the stone age.

I remember a friend complaining that he was forced to rewrite his company's website in non-compliant MSHTML after Microsoft acquired a sizeable stake in his firm. The end result was a crappy, non-scaling site that would break browsers other than IE. Wonder if Microsoft had something to do with ESPN's downfall? [note how espn.com redirects to msn.espn.go.com].

Re:ESPN.com has ditched web standards

[Romeozulu]

Oh please. IE has problems, but *nothing* that would require a complete rewrite of the code producing a crappy, non-scaling site. I think your friend needs to learn how to program. Please give us some specifics on how IE caused the site to be "non-scable"?

Re:ESPN.com has ditched web standards

[Skim123]

Wonder if Microsoft had something to do with ESPN's downfall? [note how espn.com redirects to msn.espn.go.com].

If so, they got screwed, as MSN is going to switch from ESPN to Fox Sports as their sports site of choice here shortly.

Re:ESPN.com has ditched web standards

[Compact Dick]

IE messed up the standards-compliant version which utilised fluid design [percentages instead of absolute lengths so it would scale well to any dimension].

Breaking the site for other browsers wasn't his initiative -- it was implicitly required by the new management: "fix it for IE, even if it breaks other browsers".

Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall we.

[hkmwbz]

You are irrational in your attack. I'd think that your situation is rather uncommon, actually. Opera does play nice with what most people do: A PC used by several people.

Imagine a small family with one PC. All family members can use Opera with just once license. I am sure you would rather see them paying for both mother, father, brother and sister, but they don't have to do that, because Opera has them covered.

Now enter people like you: A tiny minority. You don't realize that the way things are done now actually benefit more people than if they did it the other way around. Don't you realize that there are more people in this world than yourself?

You also don't realize that Opera for Windows, Linux and Mac are different products done by different devs. Sure, most is cross platform, but they have to do work on each platform too. So why shouldn't they charge?

You are basically complaining about something which is a non issue. What you are complaining about benefits more people than it hurts, and you are forgetting one other thing:

If you buy Opera for another platform, you pay less than half price for that additional license!

That's right. Your Windows license was $40, but your Linux license would have been just $15.

OBVIOUSLY YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the time they released the special "BORK" edition as a joke.

But what Microsoft was doing was VERY VERY SERIOUSLY wrong!

Basically if you "hacked" Opera 7 with a binary file editor and changed the name of the browser being sent to the server as being "IE" instead of Opera ... by some strange coincidence the page rendered fine using Opera 7.

The reason for this could only be that the Microsoft MSN site server was sending a "DIFFERENT" page for Opera browsers.

I remember this as if it was yesterday AND I'll bet if you hacked IE to say it was Opera 7 (not 6 which was ignored) the page you get wouldn't render properly in IE ... I hope I have worded this properly.

ESPN.com works fine in Opera 7

[blorg]

Checked it in 7.23 and 7.5. It had problems in version 6. Given that the CTO of Opera Software invented CSS during his previous job at W3C it is also eminently possible that ESPN is not valid HTML/CSS. Opera been making more efforts with non-compliant pages recently and even support *both* the aberrations that are BLINK and MARQUEE.

Re:ESPN.com works fine in Opera 7

[TrevizeNet]

Not true about ESPN, it works fine if you set your user agent string to MSIE6.0 (File->quick preferences), if you tell the site you're using Opera it renders differently. Go to the MLB scoreboard and see the difference.

-30px and the LI Tag

[The Grassy Knoll]

Further, anyone who has ever done anything with style sheets would never feed that -30px declaration and expect anything productive to be done with it

Not quite true... LI tags automatically indent horribly (to my eyes), so feeding it a negative left-margin is quite sensible to shove it leftwards, so that it lines up with the normal paragraph text...

.

Re:-30px and the LI Tag

[RedSteve]

LI tags may indent horribly, but the declaration was on the UL, not the LI. Moving the UL to the left moves the entire containing box to the left. Further, according to Eric Meyer, Opera and IE use the exact same list indenting approach: they give the UL element a left margin. Given that, why would Microsoft's CSS author(s) change the CSS that worked perfectly well in their own browser?

Yes, it could be negligence or ignorance or a failure to fully test their code (and it wouldn't be a first for Microsoft ;-) ), but given their penchant for breaking things in the past to make their product look better, you'll forgive me if I still have sneaking suspicions.

Re:-30px and the LI Tag

[dastrike]

No, because margins and paddings declared in different CSS rules don't add up - a new declaration overwrites the old one. If one would want to get rid of those margins or paddings one would have set them to zero and not a negative value.

As an Opera zelot...

[Cyno01]

let me be the first to say...

BORK!

Re:As an Opera zelot...

[Anonymous Coward]

the bork bork guy was swedish... ..opera's norwegian.

Great Link, your a champion

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time there was no special page for Opera 6 or earlier versions of Opera, so of which had "normal" early version rendering problems (which funny enough weren't as serious).

Only Opera 7 was targeted. So it would be more correct to say if Opera7 was in the UA string. Sorry to be pedantic about this, but it was very clear at the time it happened that Microsoft were trying to make the NEW browser look worse than the one it was to replace.

With......

[KazerSoza]

THe Fat Lady!

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[bhtooefr]

Also, Opera (for a while) had a promotion where you could get a second license (for a different platform) for free, AFAIK.

Eolas?

[RAMMS EIN]

Why is it that I don't see Eolas here? I'm not saying it was them, just that they have been known to sue browser makers. I know they say they did it for the good cause, but one still wonders...

Re:Eolas?

[bunratty]

Why would Eolas settle for paying Opera 12.5 million US dollars?

Let's get a few things straight

[Bronz]

1) While I'm no fan of browser-specific treatment (it's what keeps things like NS4 alive) and I'm no fan of MSN, I would hate to live in a world where I am liable if I screw up trying to support a browser. How does one determine if MSN just didn't test Opera 7 properly, or if they maliciously targeted it? Do you really want to set a precedent here?

2) I've been an Opera fan for several years and I'll admit the default interface of Opera 7 is atrocious. The first thing anyone should do is go get a custom skin you like, or use the windows_skin. Then turn off the majority of the toolbars. Once you get mouse gestures down, you don't need any toolbars at all. Normally my Opera windows consist of an address bar and 5 to 30 tabs.

3) Opera shouldn't open source their browser. Why would they? Not Everything Needs To Be Open Source (tm). Opera's foundation of qt is probably the best showcase for using open source for your closed sourced products. Asking Opera to open their source simply exemplifies the FUD that open source is viral.

Re:Let's get a few things straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 7 was a rewrite from scratch. Something only a proprietary company can do in such a short time.

This may have scared MS ... who knows?

But the fact that only Opera 7 didn't render properly, while Opera 6 did, clearly indicates MS had targeted Opera 7 specifically. This was no mistake! As for the interface, it can be completely customised and skined. I use "MacOSVolter" on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux.

Re:Let's get a few things straight

[wk633]

You need to read the second link in the article, which clearly proves that MSN targeted Opera. The proof is in the fact that changing the User agent string to 'Oprah' results in the same non-broken page sent to IE. MSN detected 'Opera', and sent it a broken page.

This was browser specific to be broken.

Re:Let's get a few things straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Try opening the same page in Opera 5. You'll see that it actually works. If you change the user agent to MSIE or whatever else, the page will appear broken.

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[HD Webdev]

Now enter people like you: A tiny minority. You don't realize that the way things are done now actually benefit more people than if they did it the other way around. Don't you realize that there are more people in this world than yourself?

Yes, I'm in a tiny minority group as far as dual boot.

But, I'm also in the tiny minority group that pays for shareware & similar software.

My frustration with this issue has more to do with the fact that Opera had a 'you bought it, we have your money, too bad' attitude. They gave me no explanation and nothing within a million miles of 'sorry, but we have to because of [whatever]'.

For the record, I did pay for the extra license. Opera saved me a lot of time and I'm more than willing to send money to companies that have helpful software.

OTOH, Opera didn't deal with the situation well and as a result, I now recommend Mozilla. This costs Opera quite a bit of money.

I realize that I'm being 'pissy' about it, but I do feel that Opera didn't give a damn about my situation at all once they had my money.

Totally offtopic

[totatis]

Ok, this is absolutly offtopic, but I couldn't resist.

The sig of parent is : "Les Francais sont des singes de capitulation qui mangent du fromage."
This can be translated (minus the grammar errors) in English by : "French people are cheese eating surrendering monkeys."

What is the problem with you guy ? How can this french racism be justified ?
Is that some type of knee-jerk reaction because you were insulted that the French governement had the balls to openly take the stake of 90% of the world population by opposing war in Irak ? Was it because the French governement (along with German, Russian ... governments) though that it was not clear Irak had WMP ? Looks like they were right.
Or are you just trying to show your complete lack of any notion of History, Humanity, toughfullness, rightfulness and veracity ?
Or maybe you cut and pasted a sentence you don't understand ? That seems unlikely.

Now, about the new fashion of describing French as cowardly, may I remember you that France got defeated by German army, the most powerful one at that time, which also defeated all Europe ? Do I need to remember you that Russia was a way more efficent combattant of Germany than the US ? Do I also remember you that the USA got smacked by Vietnam, Somalia ..., which were certainly not great powers, just random people fighting for their freedom ?

This kind of attitude only shows the world that the US has quite a number of ignorant, infantile and downright people in it. Happily, I know that there also are a lot of informed and insightful people in the USA, but, much to my dismay, those intelligent people seem to be in minority. This is very sad.

I remember seeing a few days ago on Slashdot a Brit defending France (a Brit defending France !) that very accuratly reminded the few arrogant and stupid American here that French men died to help the US become independent. Those French men died to help you get rid of the Brit, in the name of Freedom. Freedom that once upon a time was the characteristic of two countries : France and USA.

How come Bush, or should I say his neo-con silt, has be able to make you forgive about the long frienship that existed between France and the USA ? How can a few bonehead, who lied to the US population and to the world, make you forget ? Didn't you learn History and Geography in school ? Or are you now taught that what is not American is evil if it doesn't share all the ideas of your President ?

I know that there are a lot of informed, intelligent people here on Slashdot from all over the world (France and USA included), and I am shocked that someone can make such stupid and racist rant his sig. I was delighted that a Brit took the time to make points against such racist rants, but I fear that too many people do not try to educate the few stupid racist left. Or maybe I am an utopist, and maybe I should learn that there are people who will never be educated, who will never look at History, and who prefer baseless racism to intelligent criticism of their government's actions.

This is very sad that such sigs can exist on Slashdot without raising more than eyebrows. And I fear that stupid people such as parents are voters in the most powerful country in the World. Such power ought to be in hands of responsible people, not stupid and arrogant racists.

Re:Totally offtopic

[N3WBI3]

How can this french racism be justified ?

1) The French are not a race they are a culture
2) This is no more racist than jokes about fat lazy Americans

French governement had the balls to openly take the stake of 90% of the world population by opposing war in Irak ?

No it is because while opposing the war for 'humanitarian reasons' France was quite happy to profit off the oil for food program from which saddam filtered off money for new palaces rather than actually feed his people. It is because France opposed the war *strictly for their own interest* Just like the US was for the war *Strictly for their own interest*. Saddam and Iraq owed France a ton of money and now the foreign debt is in question.

Do I need to remember you that Russia was a way more efficent combattant of Germany than the US ?

No everyboy here knows the sacrifice of the Russians who faught even as their cities burned, not like the french who weeped like women rather than see one window in Paris break.

Do I also remember you that the USA got smacked by Vietnam, Somalia

Somalia was not a war, but your right the withdrawal was a cowardly act by Bill Clinton. As for Vietnam, I suppose you never heard of the treaty of Paris (and you question my knowledge of history)? Basically N Vietnam promised to leave the south alone, the US pulled out most of its forces, the US got involved in watergate, N Vietnam broke the treaty, and the Senate was too busy going with the fallout from watergate to allow Ford to enforce the treaty. Losing a war is not shameful, surrendering to Nazi's without a fight *IS*

I remember seeing a few days ago on Slashdot a Brit defending France (a Brit defending France !)

Cough** It is not the first time, and chances are it wont be the last... France always needs someone else to defend them.

French men died to help the US become independent

Yes for your own interest (too weaken England) France gave money to help the US be free. France did not do this for freedom (after all at the time they were a monarchy) France did this to fight England *FOR THEIR OWN SELF INTEREST*.

has be able to make you forgive about the long frienship that existed between France and the USA

I dont like bush, and I wont vote for him. This does not change the fact that france from the time of De'Gaul has not been a friend of the US. The french have done nothing in my lifetime but call Americans fat, lazy and stupid... Bush had nothing to do with my attitude.

Moral of the story?

[blorg]

Code to web standards and don't use browser blocking scripts.

You seem to have attempted the first, but failed on the second; maybe it just wasn't in your power to influence that decision and you made the best of a bad situation.

Browser detection is bad enough; unfortunately sometimes it is necessary. But always to improve a browser user's experience. Browser blocking based on this is however just plain obnoxious. Just serve up the IE version and let user worry about it - I don't care if the display isn't pixel perfect, it's better than displaying a page telling me to upgrade my browser - to IE. I upgraded *from* IE many years ago.

Re:Moral of the story?

[nkg]

And if you are going to or need to sniff.
Sniff for features and not browsers.

Next time...

[Anonymous Coward]

just say: "I'm clueless."

Great-The KDE of Browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, it's the KDE of browsers. Anyway how can "tabbed browsing" be 10x of anything? There are only so many ways of doing a tab. What does it do when you flip? Whistle Dixie.

Re:Great-The KDE of Browsers.

[ccp]

In other words, it's the KDE of browsers

Exactly!

And I say it as a compliment.

Cheers,

Stupid bad design

[t_allardyce]

Perhaps if web-designers (or the crappy software they use) actually adhered to web-standards and all browsers actually adhered to web-standards then we wouldnt have any problems. but no, everyone thinks they can do it better than the W3C when time and time again the W3C have prooven themselves to be gods of standards. Now look at the absolute total mess we've gotten ourselves into, do you think we will ever get out of it?

To sum up Asa's blog post...DS goes mainstream.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just because it doesn't behave exactly like your favorite program, doesn't mean that it sucks! He might have something useful to say, but when he gives the impression that unless Opera is exactly like Firefox, it will always suck,"

Why not? The exact same argument is used every time we have a Linux article. "Mozilla isn't like IE. It sux!". "OO isn't like Word. It sux!". Then there's the long line of posters, all yes men (and women), right behind them. I'd say it's all par for the course.

"And finally, read this comment: "Posted by: sas on May 13, 2004 02:54 AM". It takes the piss, but it's rather spot on and proves a point. Anyone can make anything look bad by posting biased reviews like that."

Open Sores, or have people forgotten?

Re:Block out MSIE - Childish

[Anonymous Coward]

To retailiate, here's some PHP code...

That childish behavior is similar to saying "Please do not send me any Word attachments."

The message I am getting from the parent post is NOT that I should use Opera (Which I do already by the way), but that you seek to deny content to a significant segment of the browser population. This is what all the anti-MS bashing is about in this article. You are no better than MSN.

I will reserve judgement on the content of the aforementioned example site.

Bork! Bork! Bork!

[pohlman0]

Actually, that's a reference to the "Bork" edition of Opera, released around 7.21 or so. When it became known what MSN was doing to Opera users, Opera retaliated with a version that translated the MSN page into Bork language. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. It may still be available somewhere... Since 7.5 is so cool I have little interest in looking for older versions but I'm sure a Google search would help the curious.

Re:Bork! Bork! Bork!

[fanfriggintastic]

Actually, even Google has a "Bork bork bork!" version of their search, which translates the Google site. Give it a try, funny stuff.

Re:Bork! Bork! Bork!

[Lotharjade]

I wish they would make it a permanent tool in opera for any webpages.

Secondly produce some bork skins. :D

Re:A bit FUDish

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Troll modified to +4 because I like to see truthful comments on Slashdot every once in a while.

You nailed it right on the head.

Default Toolbar

[pohlman0]

It was made for the average user: It's easier for a newbie to right-click and remove a button he finds he doesn't need than it is to expect him to find out how to add one - in that case it's a "broken" browser and he runs back to IE. Or have you not been around a new computer user lately? Try it sometime and you'll see why it's the only way to go if you want the average granny to even THINK about switching. "No, grandma, you have to download this extension, install this, right-click and configure that, and... shit, let me Google for instructions... where are you going?"

Re:Default Toolbar

[barzok]

When did I ever say anything about extensions?

In the default configuration, Opera was getting in my way. I found it cluttered, and I had a hard time finding some things. The few times I dip into Opera, I have to think hard about how I get a fresh tab to work with.

In the default configuration, on a fresh install, everything in Firefox/Mozilla was right where I needed it, I didn't have to do any configuration, and most importantly, the browser got out of my way and just let me run. I don't "need" any extensions personally, I could live without them; I have only 2 or 3 installed, just for convenience & things that an average user would never need in the first place.

Re:Default Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

What, exactly, was hard to find? Come now, don't be shy.

Also, why bother installing extensions when Opera gives me everything I need without any hassle?

Re:Default Toolbar

[obeythefist]

Wait a minute... are you saying that you would rather install an entirely new web browser instead of customising the one you have?

What an interesting lifestyle.

What do you do when you want to customise your operating system?

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't you realize that there are more people in this world than yourself?"

You must be new here.

Not quite right?

[madmaxmedia]

If what you are saying is true, then why do user agent "Opera" and user agent "Oprah" get different files?

If Microsoft simply didn't bother testing Opera compatibility due to its low market share, then why does the MSN HTML code check for user agent "Opera", and specifically send it different files than the fallback Netscape 4.7 HTML?

Your explanation is interesting, but doesn't make complete sense. The point is that Opera gets specific files that are different from both MSIE content, and the generic fallback content.

Re:Not quite right?

[spectecjr]

If what you are saying is true, then why do user agent "Opera" and user agent "Oprah" get different files?

Presumably because the code is something like this:

if (string.Contains("Opera"))
{
return netscape4.7stylesheet;
}
else if (string.Contains("MSIE 6.0")
{
return IE6stylesheet;
}

Remember: Opera 6 works fine with MSN. It was only the new Opera 7 - which had different rendering behavior - which has the problem.

Presumably Opera 6 was Netscape 4.7 compatible, whereas Opera 7 is not.

Re:Not quite right?

[madmaxmedia]

Also, there is no "fallback code". When the UA "Oprah" is used, it is sent the same CSS as the MSIE content.

Opera renders that content just fine, it only has problems with the CSS that is specifically sent to UA "Opera":

The culprit is in the "-30px" value set on the margin property. This value instructs Opera7 to move list elements 30 pixels to the left of its parent. That is, Opera7 is explicitly instructed to move content off the side of its container thus creating the impression that there is something wrong with Opera7.

Such a stunt by Microsoft would seem too stupid to believe, so I'm willing to consider the possibility that Microsoft just made a mistake. But your explanation does not fit what is going on.

Re:Not quite right?

[madmaxmedia]

Thanks for the reply. I'm a little unclear about whether Opera 6 renders MSN.com correctly. From here, I get the impression that Opera 6 does not render MSN.com correctly either due to the CSS it is receiving. Opera 6 still seems to be getting the "site.css" file that screws up Opera 7.

The original page explaining the whole debacle only specifically talks about Opera 7, so I can't tell whether Opera 6 worked or not at that point. If it did, then your explanation is completely valid and it would seem to be a innocent error. If not, then there would be no reason for MS to specifically check for Opera if it wasn't going to bother testing compatibility (since the regular MSIE content actually renders fine!)

Thanks

Bort? That's BORK!

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing

[BiggerIsBetter]

I like Opera, but I've become very reliant on Mozilla's AdBlock plug-in. I've paid my fee, so please Opera, give me ad-blocking! I can't stand surfing the 'net with garish flashing crap everywhere!

Re:One thing

[bigtrouble77]

Well, opera does have the pop-up blocker, and it's super easy to "Turn off Plugins" which will disable those annoying flash adds (I have it set to a shortcut). I turn plugins on when I'm at a site that functionally requires flash. Not sure how mizilla's works, but this solution eliminates like 90% of adds I encounter. You can also turn off animated gifs.

Re:One thing

[Freexe]

The thing that i love about opera is if you want something it almost certainly already exists: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=6061921819 d27764f0839310fbc979be&showtopic=160967&st=0&#entr y2019236 you just have to use google or the opera forums to find them.

Re:One thing

[BiggerIsBetter]

Ugly hacks. AdBlock lets you right click on images and flash, then select adblock and edit the URL pattern if you wish. That is actually mentioned in the URL you posted.

Re:One thing

[jp10558]

You know, I never really understood why so many think * and the kitchen sink should be included with everything. However, I can see ad blocking being part of a browser - the downside is it is a lot of work, so much so that it is probably equivilent to the browser itself. Also, ad's change every day, and to have to wait for a browser upgrade to add functionality to blocking seems to hurt the usiability of the browser. I happen to like having separate programs for one thing each, but I understand I am the minority. I personally think a good compromise would be bundling an ad blocker with Opera, with a install like the Java install, so it would all be configured right out of the box. I would ask for some deal where Opera could use Proxomitron with the JD5000 filters, that would certainly add value to the browser as a whole, while providing some financial reward to the hard working people who developed such gems.

I know I don't experiance the same web using Opera with Proxomitron as the people using IE, and I am much happier for it.

Re:One thing

[obeythefist]

www.everythingisnt.com will help you there. Mike's ad blocking hosts file has given me unparalleled peace and quiet. You can even add www.microsoft.com in as 0.0.0.0 if it makes you feel good.

Re:One thing

[obeythefist]

Actually despite all the functionality, Opera is still a very lean browser, and the rendering engine is still the fastest on the planet.

Opera vs. IE not Opera vs. FireFox

[at_slashdot]

Guys, the issue is that Opera is far better than IE. I can't use IE anymore, I always try to use mouse gesture... even in Word or Excel... I have used both FireFox and Opera, I settled for Opera, but that's personal preference. Firefox is great too and of course free. Any browser that bites in the MS monpoly is good, we should all support companies like Opera that make good products that beat the crap out of Microsoft. In fact appreciate Opera for having the guts to charge for otherwise a "free" as in beer product.

Re:Great.... LINUX LICENSE??

[lcsjk]

Did you get your Linux License from that 3-letter company?? C'mon, admit it, you got scared and ran, didn't you!

Opera ROCKS!!!

[rice_burners_suck]

Good! I'm using Opera right now... Version six-point-something. Funny thing is, I also have the newest version installed on the same computer, and I switch between them depending on the sites I want to view. (I have different preferences set up in each of them.) Try that with Exploder...

Opera is also much safer. Who cares if it costs 40 bucks or whatever? Of all the browsers I've tried, it's the best one out there. Renders EVERY page except the ones Microsoft OBVIOUSLY screw up to make Opera appear defective. Just like they did with Windows 3.1 and DR-DOS. And probably on many other occasions that don't come to mind right now. And who wants to look at Microsoft's retarded web sites anyway?

Opera. Because friends don't let friends use crappy browsers.

Re:Block out MSIE - Childish

[Anonymous Coward]

That childish behavior is similar to saying "Please do not send me any Word attachments."

What's so childish about that? I don't have MS Word, so any such attachments are useless to me.

User Agent Sniffing - the bane.

[Anonymous Coward]

User Agent Sniffing is the bane of web development. I used to work with company whose product used a Spyglass browser for embedded systems. The browser was 5 years old (at the time), and one day, Hotmail decides to adjust their user agent filter and our customers were left in the dust. The (licensed) browser was so old, that I couldn't get any support whatsoever. Hotmail's excuse was that the site had improvements that required updated browsers. Eventually, I edited the executable with a Hex editor and changed the UA it to match MSIE's browser agent string. Hotmail worked perfectly after that. In fact, I'd probably argue that *any* HTML 3.2 compliant browser can still open any proper web page as long as it doesn't have UA sniffing.

So these days, I just don't give a crap about evangelizing browser types. When I customize a browser, I'll change the UA string to match IE's.

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[jp10558]

I don't know what experiance you had, but I have to say that Opera has been one of the most responsive companies I have ever seen in terms of listening to it's users. I think that is a help and a hindrance.

As a help, they have numerous forums where you even as a free user get not only very knowledgable volunteers offering solutions and fixes, but responses from Customer Service reps and developers. They listen to the Users quite a bit and add requested features or change features usually within a few updates, for instance from 7.2 to 7.23 many things were fixed or changed due to user requests. I'm sure 7.51 will be out in a month or so to clean up the "new" interface and related bugs.

As a hindrance, I think their problem with the default interface is that their feedback comes mostly from Opera users in the preview and beta releases. So the people commenting on the design are used to the somewhat hetic designs of Opera UI. There were lots of complaints of the simplyfing of the UI in 7.5 on the Opera Forums, many asking how to get the "really horrible" UI of 7.23 back, and many dumbfounded that anyone found 7.5 default better. They are catering more to their customers than to new users.

Fortunately it is easy enough to fix. Just have 3 skin options in the default install, and let the user choose on first install.

Say minimalist(munin), I.E./Mozilla style(Traditional), Full Featured (current Opera Default). Have Traditional be the new default. The only other thing I would do is have the default home page be simpler, say not opera.com, but home.opera.com or something, where you have an almost AOL style page.

Say big boxes with - BUY, HELP/Forums, SKINS/UI.

3 choices and probably a bunch of ads on the page to help pay for the whole thing(no popups). So if you don't like the in program ads, one click to buy. You don't know how something works, and the program help is not sufficient? Easy access to the forums for help. Don't like any of the default skins? Right there for access to more skins, looks, UI's than I can possibly imagine.

Opera - it's not for kids...

[WIAKywbfatw]

I'm sorry, the default interface doesn't exactly match your idea of perfection: how remiss of the guys at Opera to not have read your mind in designing the out-of-the-box configuration of what's an extremely flexible piece of software.

Look, if you can't spend two minutes customising the interface of an application that you'll likely use several times a day then that's your problem. The default interface works fine for lots of people, and I've yet to come across an Opera user who hasn't figured how to right-click on an unwanted part of the UI and select the "Remove from Toolbar" option.

I'm guessing that if you couldn't manage that much that your word processor of choice has the same default page margins that it shipped with, that your multimedia player has had no additional codecs added to it and that your desktop has remained the same since your OS was installed. Heck, I bet your car has the same seat and mirror positions that it rolled off the factory floor with too.

Without wanting to be more sarcastic than I've already been, can you please tell me how you'd improve Opera's default interface? I appreciate that your answer might take more than the two minutes it would take a monkey to customise Opera to suit their own tastes but I'd be interested to see just what you'd expect to find (or not to find) the first time you ran the application.

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you some kind of idiot?

Didn't you see the example with a family PAYING for Opera, and not having to pay for more than once license for one PC?

IT MAKES SENSE TO PAY PER PC THAN PER HEAD FOR MOST PEOPLE.

Get your head out of your ass and smell reality. You are not the ONLY one who pays for commercial software. You are not the ONLY one whose needs should be catered for.

The explanation is in fucking license.txt. Read it yourself. Are you so fucking thick that they have to explain to you more than once that they charge per PC rather than per head? How many fucking ways can one put it?!

Jesus, you fucking moron, pull your head out of your ass. PLEASE.

Opera - a lean and mean browser? Clue follows...

[hkmwbz]

What "tiny browser" might you be referring to?

Even Opera 2 had a newsreader and could send mail!

"I just could not fathom paying for it (or should I say the bloat that comes with it), particularly now with the likes of Mozilla Firefox and such."

Well for one, Opera has the convenience of everything being available immediately, so there's no need to test loads of extensions to get more than basic functionality. If we both did a clean install at the same time, I would be on my way, surfing immediately, while you would be busy installing one and one Firefox extension, and even restarting between each (Opera applies stuff like toolbar customization, skins, etc. on the fly - no need to restart). If Opera does what I need and I'd rather be browsing than playing around with potentially buggy extensions, why shouldn't I be using Opera?

"I think Opera should step back from the bloat, release an updated minimalist version (as it once was back in the day), and sell it online for $5. Will that happen? Probably not. Will alot of people pay for Opera in it's current state? Probably not."

As you can see above, there was no "minimalist version". It's always been more than just a browser. Why would Opera release a browser only version when you can get a plain browser with Windows, or download Firefox for free?

And what do you know about how many people pay for Opera? Check out their revenue reports. They make millions off their desktop products.

Off with the rose-tinted glasses please. Just because not everyone does this kind of integration doesn't mean that Opera can't pull it off. Plenty of money in the bank seem to prove you wrong.

ALL worship OPera!

[Lotharjade]

I love opera and second your view. It takes a bit of customization to get it how I like it, but after that Im in LOVE! Gotta get the page bar on the bottom of the screen. Wish it came that way.

Warning: FUD and misinformation. Correction here..

[hkmwbz]

If you disable them, Opera actually doesn't load that part of the program into memory. Hiding is as good as removing them, in other words.

Why? Because Opera shares resources and reuses a lot of code. That's why the program is so damn small.

What is speed?

[hkmwbz]

Let's make a bet. I bet I can browse through ten sites faster with Opera than you can with Links or Lynx. Why? Because of stuff like opening links in the background, MDI (tab browsing), etc. There's more to speed than page rendering.

Oh, and I can disable images in Opera with a single keypress, and make it even faster.

Re:What is speed?

[bhtooefr]

Good points. Of course, can I use virtual shells on my Links session? Or use GLinks-Hacked, and have tabbed browsing too? Then I have that.

I'm typing this from Opera (7.23, I need to grab my flash drive and update it), BTW. I'm just saying that Opera's claim of Fastest Browser On Earth might be false (however, if it weren't for that slogan, this post would be typed from MSIE, and not Moz - I've ALWAYS hated Netscape and variants since v1.2 Win16).

Re:What is speed?

[obeythefist]

They measure the performance on big, ugly, chunky pages and images, basically the worst of the worst where Operas background loading and other rendering features come into play, and inclusive of most of the expanded functionality that Opera/Mozilla/MSIE uses comes into play. Of course lynx is probably much faster at displaying a pure-text html file.

Re:What is speed?

[hkmwbz]

My point was kind of that "fastest" is not only about rendering speed. Opera's UI makes it the fastest browser, at least for my use. There is no other browser I can work as efficiently with as Opera.

BORK IT, Bork it good!

[Lotharjade]

You should talk them into making the Bork feature a toolbar option on all new opera programs. So we can change any page to BOrk! Secondly if someone would make a bork skin with the Chef that would be friggin awesome!

Re:BORK IT, Bork it good!

[Nimrangul]

I was actually disappointed when Opera's releases didn't included something like that under the user preferences.

Like with the Authour Mode/User Mode, just adding in Bork Mode would be nice and probably not so hard that it would be any trouble.

Re:BORK IT, Bork it good!

[Lotharjade]

Well, hopefully the guy I replied to will take it to opera and tell them the demand it had. He said it was his javascript they used. His name was JediTrainer .

I call bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is SLOWER at JS/DOM? Not according to most tests.

I call bullshit. You don't know what you are talking about.

Saying Opera 7 is "only marginally better" than Opera 6 proves how ignorant and utterly pathetic you are.

could be asp.net

[js3]

I run a website with asp.net and I've had opera people complaining they get errors when they visit the page. For a while I had no idea what they were talking about, it looked just great on my end with opera but it turns out, if opera 6 doesn't identify itself as IE or Netscape, asp.net thinks it is a mobile device. with no mobile components installed it ended up with an error.

Lies, lies, lies.

[hkmwbz]

One of the management guys bought stock long after the press release, and when the stock price had stabilized for the day. He didn't buy it on today's lowest, but when it reached its peak.

If he has bought before the press release, it would have been insider trading, and illegal. Check your facts before you spew out nonsense willya.

Short answer: Embedded devices.

[hkmwbz]

Opera might not be competing on the desktop, but they certainly are on the embedded side. Microsoft's embedded browser is crap, a stripped down version of desktop IE.

IE has won the desktop war long ago. But Opera is still a thread on devices.

Re:Short answer: Embedded devices.

[Reziac]

When I looked at the Opera site earlier today, it did make me wonder if their MAJOR market might be not everyday users, but rather, embedded devices. But given that embedded browsers are not going to be full-featured anyway, I still find blocking just ONE version of Opera a trifle strange and unlikely as malice.

Re:Short answer: Embedded devices.

[hkmwbz]

Opera's embedded browsers are full-featured. They use the exact same core as the desktop versions. So you get a full browser - the same you would use on the desktop - for your device. If Opera is available for it, that is.

People like Access with their NetFront browser have tried to keep up with Opera, but frankly, everything else sucks. Mozilla's embedded browser project might be interesting to follow, but until it is further in development, Opera beats everything else, including wannabe crap like NetFront.

Re:Short answer: Embedded devices.

[Reziac]

Just out of curiosity, what devices currently use the embedded Opera browser? (I don't use handhelds and their kin, so don't really keep up on that front.)

Haven't heard of Netfront, no idea what it's like. There's a little bitty browser called OffByOne that would probably be good for minimalist embedding. Moz has become such bloatware that I don't have a lot of faith in any direction it takes anymore :(

Re:Short answer: Embedded devices.

[hkmwbz]

Opera is the default/main browser for Symbian OS, which is used by all the major mobile players, such as Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, and so on. In addition, it's on Linux based devices, such as the Sharp Zaurus. There are some phones where Opera is branded, and some where it is not identified as Opera. Recenty, a phone was announced in Japan, where Opera's logo is featured on the phone's keypad. Also, Nokia recently bragged about having Opera in a recent run of ads. Kind of shows how Opera is building itself up in the mobile market.

NetFront is a Japanese mobile-only browser. Obviously, it can't measure up to desktop browsers like Opera and Mozilla, so the company relies on FUD and lies to make people choose their garbage over Opera. But that's a different story I guess.

Re:Short answer: Embedded devices.

[Reziac]

Ah, okay, that's quite a list. Sure explains why a browser that's barely a dent in the desktop market seems to be doing so well -- that's a lot of license fees, especially if they get something for every unit sold. I've no use for a cell phone myself, so hadn't paid that any attention either, but that keypad thing is pretty clever use of logo-branding.

OT: Norwegian newspapers Was: Re:Another interesti

[The Wannabe King]

I know from personal experience (and loads of other sources) that Dagbladet is the least reliable of the national newspapers. (Søndag, søndag is more or less a porn magazine.) It has no problems printing more or less whatever, and if it makes a mistake, you can just forget having a correction printed.

I suppose the "worst competitor" is VG, since they are the largest newspaper in Norway and are in the exact same market segment. VG is a lot better, they are actually willing to correct their mistakes.

One thing I can admit though, when I wrote "of the worst sort", I was comparing to Norwegian standards. I know there are papers in UK and USA that make even Dagbladet look like the truth of God. Dagbladet and VG is still less reliable sources than papers like Stavanger Aftenblad and Aftenposten.

www.aiwa.com anti opera and mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

www.aiwa.com doesn't work with anything other than ie.

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't. opera is run by a bunch of losers!

I can not stand microsoft, but i do not like some two-bit comapny telling me how to write my web pages.

Opera is a bunch of whiney cry babbies.

The club must sell the clothes for the analogy.

[cgenman]

For the analogy to work, your club must sell clothes through outlets. The club would then only allow in people with their clothes on, all emblazoned with their big fat logo, in attempt to make other people use their clothes. Their clothes would also automatically repulse anyone not wearing their clothes, and would refuse to walk into houses that weren't bought through the club's real estate agents.

Ok, my analogy is even more stretched than yours, but you get the idea.

Re:Let's try to be somewhat rational here, shall w

[HD Webdev]

The explanation is in fucking license.txt. Read it yourself. Are you so fucking thick that they have to explain to you more than once that they charge per PC rather than per head? How many fucking ways can one put it?!

Jesus, you fucking moron, pull your head out of your ass. PLEASE.

Actually, AC, the explanation is in my post.

It was one PC. It happened to be dual-boot Win32/Linux.

It was not 2 seperate PCs. And, again, I did pay for the extra license for that same PC.

Search keywords (was re:Great)

[RadGeekAuburn]

Konqueror's web shortcuts: type "gg: foo" in the location bar, and it will search google for "foo", it's configurable (define your own) and has a lot of things already. Opera & Firefox both have a seperate box for it, but I find that less efficient, and as far as I can find, Opera doesn't allow it to be configured for other sites.

N.B.: This feature is already included in Opera 7.5 (I don't know whether it was in previous versions or not); the syntax is just slightly different. Go to the address field and put in "g foo" and press enter; there's your Google search from the address bar. (There are also keywords for all the other search engines that Opera supports, which are listed in Preferences > Search.)

HTH.